The boundary between human and non-human is becoming increasingly thin, and it is precisely in the ocean that this boundary is about to be crossed. Did you know that, in 2018, an orca named Wikie has been shown to be able to imitate human words like “hello” and “one two three”? I found out this study by pure chance, and I made sure that the news was true: orcas are beings of extraordinary cognitive complexity.
These marine predators, often feared and misunderstood, have a brain that weighs about 5 kilograms (three and a half times larger than ours) and with a neocortex more corrugated than any other animal on the planet, including us. But this ability to imitate vocally is not just a curiosity: according to experts, It could represent a real attempt to establish contact with us.
Intelligence, all of a sudden
It should come as no surprise that killer whales have a remarkable ability to mimic speech. They are highly auditory animals, as explained Deborah Giles, a scientist and expert on killer whales SeaDoc Society, an organization that conducts marine scientific research.
“Orcas thrive on their ability to communicate over long distances to understand what their surroundings are like, where to find each other and where to find food,” explains Giles.
Communication is simply part of their nature. An example? Giles tells the story of Luna, a young orca separated from her pod and stranded off the west coast of Vancouver Island. Isolated from her peers, with whom she would normally communicate, Luna began to mimic the sounds of boats and other marine life in the area, apparently in an attempt to communicate.
Culture, not just instinct
Communication between killer whales is important: these are not just social animals, they are cultural animals, as he says. Lori Marino, neuroscientist who studies animal intelligence and behavior, particularly known for her work with whales on the evolution of the brain and intelligence.
Marino describes culture as a set of habits and behaviors that are learned and passed from one animal to another, and from older animals to younger ones. Culture varies from one group or community of killer whales to another.
Orcas off the coast of New Zealand, for example, have a different culture than those in the Pacific Northwest. These cultural differences are learned and really define who they are as a community.
Most cultural behaviors are quite serious and involve hunting, feeding, and raising young. Other behaviors are just fun, or bizarre. In the summer of 1987, young killer whales from several pods began swimming with dead salmon on their heads. Some of the whales began doing this, and soon the “salmon hat” became the backwards baseball cap of the pod. By the following summer, salmon hats were out of fashion. Then the trend is reappeared in 2024.
Orcas, a “beautiful mind”
All this cultural communication requires large, complex brains. When we hear that an orca can mimic human speech, we immediately think, “Wow, whales are so smart. They’re almost like us.” But when it comes to brain structure and brain potential, Marino says it might make more sense to ask whether there are things we could do that would make humans as smart as an orca.
The orca's brain, as we have said, is large compared to ours. It is large, in fact, even compared to the size of the orca's body itself, about two and a half times larger than one would expect for an animal of that size. But it is not just a question of size.
The orca brain is very complex. The orca neocortex, which contains regions involved in, among other things, cognition, emotion, memory, and, yes, communication, is the most corrugated neocortex of any animal brain on the planet—even more corrugated than human brains, Marino says.
Orcas, the bridge beyond words
I often wonder what would happen if we could really decipher animal language, and of course killer whales. Maybe we would discover that, while we were trying to understand if they could imitate us, they were already trying to tell us something important.
With projects like the one of Monika Wieland Shields, co-founder and director of theOrca Behavior Institute, which uses hydrophone arrays to localize vocalizations and match them to behavior observed via drones, we may be one step closer to creating a true orca-human dictionary. In the meantime, those “hellos” uttered by Wikie are not just an echo of our voice, but perhaps the start of a conversation just waiting to be continued.
