Orca Wikie's 2018 Vocal Mimicry Re-Examines Cetacean Learning Capacity

A 2018 scientific demonstration involving a female orca named Wikie, which has recently circulated in online discussions in 2026, centered on her ability to imitate human vocalizations, including the word "hello." This event, detailed in a study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, provides significant evidence of the vocal learning capacity and cognitive flexibility present in killer whales, Orcinus orca. The international research team, which included scientists from the University of St Andrews and the Complutense University of Madrid, specifically sought to determine the extent to which these marine mammals could replicate sounds entirely outside their natural acoustic repertoire.

Wikie, a 14-year-old female housed at the Marineland Aquarium in Antibes, France, was the subject of the investigation, which employed a 'do-as-I-do' paradigm to test production imitation learning. Researchers aimed to ascertain if this mechanism could explain the distinct, group-specific vocal patterns, or dialects, observed among wild killer whale populations. Wikie was trained to respond to a 'copy' command and was then exposed to both familiar orca sounds and novel human utterances. The human sounds included words such as "hello," "Amy," the name of her trainer, and the sequence "one, two, three."

In the human sound condition, Wikie produced recognizable copies of all six novel sounds tested before the seventeenth trial, with two specific utterances, "hello" and "one, two, three," successfully mimicked on the first attempt. Although the resulting sounds were not perfect replicas of human speech, waveform analysis confirmed a fair match to the original human speech patterns. Professor Josep Call, a co-author from the University of St Andrews, noted that presenting sounds like "hello," which fall outside the orca's natural repertoire, was essential for testing true flexibility in sound copying.

This capacity for vocal production learning—acquiring a novel sound solely through hearing it—is a rare trait among mammals, positioning whales and dolphins within a select group alongside humans. Beyond human speech, the research confirmed Wikie's ability to copy unfamiliar vocalizations from a conspecific model, including a sound resembling blowing a raspberry. This finding supports the theory that vocal dialects in the wild are socially learned through imitation, aligning with broader research indicating that killer whales possess complex cognitive abilities, including flexible thinking and the transmission of learned behaviors across generations, which are key components of culture.