– – We all know that parrots and mynah birds can mimic human speech. A memorable Far Side cartoon depicted a carload of cows driving past a field of wandering humans, one cow leaning out the window and mocking the “yackety-yack” speech of people. Well, it seems that we can add another species to the short list of those now know to be capable of speech mimicry..the beluga whale!
Whales are no slouches in the intelligence department, but a study recently published in Current Biology under the title “Spontaneous speech mimicry by a cetacean” really blew me away. The whale of the study, named Noc, lived at San Diego’s National Marine Mammal Foundation for 30 years before dying in 2007. It seems that handlers first heard mumbling in 1984 coming from a tank containing whales and dolphins that sounded like two people chatting far away. One day after a diver surfaced from the tank and asked, “Who told me to get out?” researchers realized that the garbled sounds came from a captive male Beluga whale. For several years, they then recorded its spontaneous sounds while it was underwater and upon surfacing.
An acoustic analysis revealed that the human-like sounds were several octaves lower than typical whale calls, and scientists think that the whale’s close proximity to people enabled it to listen to and mimic human speech by changing the pressure in its nasal cavities. Now the whale appears to be saying the word “out” over and over, and some have said that it sounds like people singing in the shower or the Muppets’ Swedish Chef.
Beluga whales, also known as white whales, are sometimes called “the canaries of the sea” because of how vocal they are. Anecdotal reports have surfaced in the past of whales sounding like humans. At Vancouver Aquarium, keepers had suggested that a white whale about 15 years of age had uttered his name, “Lagosi.” While people should not think from these results that whales can communicate with us on a conversational level, it’s an intriguing possibility for future research…
– – I, for one, worry about extremely large whiskey-swilling birds of prey terrorizing the neighborhood; they might, for example, lower already-depressed property values, to say nothing of discouraging tourism. 
– – A not-so giant mammoth excavated from the Siberian permafrost in late September 2,200 miles northeast of Moscow near the Sopochnaya Karga cape was a 16-year-old at the time of his death who stood two meters tall (6’6″) and weighed 500 kilograms (1,100 lbs). He was named Jenya after the 11-year-old Russian boy who found the animal’s limbs sticking out of the frozen mud. Jenya was missing a left tusk, a fact which handicapped him for fighting and may have contributed to his early death tens of thousands of years ago.
– – I’m always glad when giant eyeballs wash up on beaches, bringing to mind as they do such vintage sci-fi classics as 1958’s The Crawling Eye. Eyeballs by nature tend to make people squeamish, especially disembodied ones…and in time for Halloween, too!- -What a gift from the sea!
– – There’s a rather controversial and disconcerting experience that’s becoming quite the rage in some circles; swimming with tigers!
– – Just when the Jurassic Park films had us hoping for such a real-life scenario, it turns out to be virtually impossible owing to the calculated half-life of DNA, which figures out to be only around 521 years. 
– – You’ve probably seen Kit-Cat Klocks,
— I, for one, find the prospect of exploding reptiles both darkly amusing yet creepy and disturbing, one of those rare things that both captivates yet repels me at the same time. You don’t really want to see such a thing yet if you did, you couldn’t bear to look away, either! With that in mind, I offer the following true story to kindred spirits like myself who dearly love tales of the grotesquely fascinating.
FOXSYLVANIA 
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