Beluga whales are nicknamed “the canaries of the sea” because of how vocal they are. They click, chirp, whistle, and trill almost constantly. Their squishy “melon” - the round forehead bulge above their face - can change shape, letting them direct sound and produce a startling range of noises.
One captive beluga at the U.S. National Marine Mammal Foundation in the 1980s, named Noc, took things further. Researchers noticed strange sounds coming from his tank that didn’t quite match the usual beluga repertoire. The sounds were lower, more rhythmic, more conversational. Closer to human speech.
The most famous moment came when a diver in Noc’s tank heard “out, out” and surfaced thinking a colleague had called him. The “voice” turned out to be the beluga, mimicking the pattern and pitch of the humans he’d been listening to for years. Noc could lower his pitch by about three octaves to do it - far below a beluga’s normal voice.
