Everyone knows that parrots can mimic human speech. So can a few other birds, including ravens and starlings. But it's not just birds that speak up. Here are a few less obvious examples of animals that have learned to sound like people.
At least one elephant is using his trunk for more than just eating. Koshik, a 22-year-old Asian Elephant in a Seoul, South Korea zoo, has learned to reproduce five Korean wordsâ "annyeong" (hello), "anja" (sit down), "aniya" (no), "nuwo" (lie down) and "joa" (good)âby placing his trunk inside his mouth to modulate sound. This, says an international team of researchers who have been studying the elephant since 2010, is a âwholly novel method of vocal production.â
Koshikâs trainers first noticed that the pachyderm was imitating them in 2004. The best evidence that Koshik is actually mimicking humans is that the sound frequencies of his words match those of his trainers; researchers believe he learned to mimic human speech because he was lonely (Koshik was separated from other elephants when he was 5). Heâs better with vowels than with consonantsâhis rates of similarity are 67 percent and 21 percent, respectively. Thereâs no evidence that Koshik understands the words, though he does respond to certain commands.
And Koshik might not be the only talking elephant. In 1983, zoo officials in Kazakhstan reported that one of their elephants could reproduce 20 Russian phrases, but no scientists ever researched the claim.
In 1984, researchers at the National Marine Mammal Foundation in San Diego, California, noticed something funny: They would hear people talking around their beluga whale "NOC"âs enclosure, even when no one was nearby. For a while, they couldnât figure it out, until a diver in NOCâs tank thought that someone had told him to get out. It was, in fact, NOC, who was making a sound like the word âout.â
NOC kept up the vocalizations for a few years, allowing Sam Ridgeway of the U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program in San Diego to record and study the belugaâs vocalizations. "The speechlike sounds were several octaves lower in frequency than the whale's usual sounds," Ridgeway, who co-authored a recently-released study on NOC in Current Biology , told National Geographic. NOC made the sounds by inflating air sacs to a much higher pressure than he did when making normal whale vocalizations.
NOC, who died in 1999, stopped the vocalizations in the late 1980sâprobably, researchers theorize, because he reached sexual maturity. But why was a whale mimicking humans such a big deal anyway? Because NOC learned spontaneously, through listening to the humans around himâa phenomenon not previously demonstrated in cetaceans.
In 1971, George and Alice Swallow picked up an orphaned harbour seal pup in Cundy Harbor, Maine. They raised the sealânamed Hoover, because he ate like a vacuum cleanerâfirst in their bathtub, and then in a pond behind their house. But when he got too big, the Swallows gave Hoover to the New England Aquarium in Boston, Massachusetts. George told aquarium employees that he thought the seal could talk. No one believed him. But in a few years, when Hoover reached sexual maturity, he began to speak more clearlyâcomplete with Boston accent! The seal could say a number of words and phrases, including "hey," âhello there,â âhow are ya,â âget outta here,â âget down,â and his own name (you can listen to Hoover talking here ). Hoover laughed, too, and when he died in 1985, he got his own obituary in the Boston Globe. Scientists believe that pinnipeds might help us understand what's involved in complex vocal learning.
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