The story begins with the fact that millions of years before humans existed, the oceans were filled with a vast network of whale songs. Each species had its unique sounds, such as the humpback’s courting arias or the sperm whale’s distinct clicking dialects. However, due to human activities, these sounds are slowly being drowned out by noise pollution.
In the mid-1970s, the US Navy began using marine mammals for tasks such as mine detection and torpedo recovery. The latest Soviet submarines had shifted the focus of the naval cold war to the Arctic, which was an off-limits environment for animals such as dolphins and sea lions used in the Navy Marine Mammal Program. The Navy needed marine mammals capable of locating and retrieving sunken experimental torpedoes in the frigid waters and low visibility of the Arctic.
In 1977, the Navy dispatched a team to the northern coast of Manitoba, where they procured six belugas for a new Arctic initiative called “Cold Ops.” One of these belugas was a 2-year-old male calf named Noc, who lived his entire life in captivity, working with human trainers. He was even deployed for two top-secret Navy surveillance and retrieval programs before succumbing to meningitis in 1999 at the age of 23 while still in the Navy’s care.
While in captivity, Noc began to mimic human speech. In 2012, a 20-odd-second recording of Noc was included as a supplement to a research paper by veterinarian Sam Ridgway called “Spontaneous Human Speech Mimicry by a Cetacean,” which was published in the journal Current Biology. The recording quickly went viral, with Noc’s voice being played on computers worldwide.
While Noc’s voice may sound like a delirious drunk humming an atonal tune through a tissue-covered comb, the science behind his mimicry and its apparent motives reveal something far more urgent and haunting. It was the spectral outpourings of a young white whale calling to us across both time and the vast linguistic divide between humans and other animals. Noc had found a way to speak to humans, both literally and figuratively, of the true nature of his kind, and the need to bridge the gap between animals and humans.
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