A new study suggests that a beluga whale was capable of learning to imitate the human voice. The whale lived at the National Marine Mammal Foundation in San Diego, California, for 30 years until his death in 1999. Researchers had first noticed the peculiarity in 1984, when they heard people talking but there was no one else around or when one of the divers thought he heard someone say "get out" one day while he was cleaning the tank. But it really was NOC the beluga whale, who was only mimicking something that just sounded like the word "out." When researchers annaylized the recordings of NOC's speech like utterances they found that the frequency and rhythm approximated that of a human. The actual frequencies were a few octaves lower than the whales normal sounds, making it seem that the whale adopted the intonation patterns of people talking. Though after four years the mimicking stopped due to the belief that NOC had reached sexual maturity, researchers do believe that the reason that NOC and other sea creatures in captivity are found to mimic humans is because instinctually they do it in the wild. Dolphins will mimic other dolphins whistles and humpback whales will learn songs from each other. Whatever the reason may be I find that this peculiarity proves that there is much that we still do not know about life under the sea and that animals intellects may be greater than we have perceived.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/10/121022-whales-voices-science-animals-humans-marine-mammals/
https://soundcloud.com/cdellamore/hear-a-beluga-whale-talk
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