Hoover (seal)

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Hoover (* 1971 ; † July 25, 1985 in Boston , Massachusetts ) was a seal that could imitate the human voice . He was found a howler in the spring of 1971 and raised by people. At around four months old, the animal was given to the New England Aquarium in Boston Harbor. There, Hoover developed into a crowd favorite because of his unusual talent for languages. He could formulate whole sentences and spoke with a New England accent typical of the English language . Hoover has been the subject of several research papers and numerous newspaper articles.

Life

The New England Aquarium , 1985

On May 5, 1971, fisherman George H. Swallow discovered a seal howler on the Maine coast near the township of Cundy's Harbor. Swallow took the motherless animal and tried to raise it first in the bathtub at home. Initially the animal refused to eat, but then it devoured the mackerel on offer at such a rapid rate that it was given the name Hoover , based on the well-known vacuum cleaner brand . When Hoover was too big for the Swallows' bathtub, the animal moved to the family garden. George Swallow and his wife Alice spoke to the animal regularly and let Hoover roam freely around the house and garden. After a few weeks, the Swallows noticed that Hoover was mimicking their speeches.

In August, when Hoover was too big for the Swallows to care for, they turned the animal over to the New England Aquarium in Boston. Swallow advised the zookeepers that Hoover could speak, but they didn't take him seriously. In his new home, Hoover's special talent was initially not noticed. It was only when Hoover reached sexual maturity that he used his talent to impress the female seals. At first his vocalizations were limited to screams, but his noises became increasingly human-like. On November 11, 1978, a completely amazed zookeeper noted that the seal had said its name "Hoover" in plain English. The scientists working at the aquarium reacted similarly surprised and examined Hoover's behavior more closely. As people became more involved with Hoover, the seal began to communicate with them again. Phrases like "Hello there!", "Get outta here!" Or "Whaddaya doin '?" Were clearly understandable. The zoologist Katherine Ralls described Hoover's sounds like those of a man with a Boston accent. Often times, Hoover sounded drunk as the words slurred easily. The mystery of why Hoover spoke with a clearly recognizable New England accent was quickly solved when the scientist contacted the former owners - the seal had imitated the language of George Swallows.

Hoover became a major attraction at the aquarium in the years that followed. In the early 1980s several magazine articles appeared about him and he was featured on the television program Good Morning America and on National Public Radio , among others . When he died of a viral brain infection in 1985 at the age of 14, his obituary appeared in The Boston Globe .

Hoover had six offspring, none of which had inherited the talent. Hoover's grandson Chacoda, who also lives in the New England Aquarium, showed his ability to make human sounds at an early age.

Exploring language skills

Before Hoover's behavior was studied by scientists, the imitation of human sounds was mainly known from songbirds. In addition, it has been observed that whales can mimic individual human sounds. It was only after scientists became aware of Hoover's abilities that the speech behavior of seals in captivity and in the wild was examined more closely in the 1980s. Today, whales and seals are considered to be the only mammals besides humans that can imitate complex voices. According to studies by the evolutionary biologist Tecumseh Fitch , the brain structures and speech organs of seals are most similar to those of humans. Seals with skills similar to Hoover could be the origin of the Celtic Selkie myth , according to Fitch .

According to anthropologist Terrence Deacon, the fact that Hoover's talent for languages ​​exceeded that of other seals could be due to a brain disease that the animal suffered as a puppy. Deacon discovered Hoover by chance in 1984 when he heard the seal call out while walking. Deacon had studied Hoover's behavior for about a year. He found that Hoover was less talkative during the mating season, when male seals usually vie for females. Katherine Ralls had also studied Hoover's language behavior over a long period of time, and she believed this was an example of mimicry . Tecumseh Fitch, on the other hand, is convinced that as a puppy, Hoover learned his language skills in the "sensitive phase" through imprinting .

Sonograms of Hoover's language showed that, unlike humans, his sounds had hardly any rhythm . Individual words were strung together without pauses. Hoover emphasized vowels more than consonants . Hoover used to hold his head up to make the human-sounding sounds. When speaking, the lip and tongue moved only minimally, which in Deacon's view made him look like a ventriloquist .

Most often, Hoover uttered the human sounds when he swam laps alone in the tank of the aquarium. In contact with other seals, however, Hoover articulated himself completely normally. Deacon therefore interpreted Hoover's speaking as an expression of boredom. Often he lined up words and sentences without any recognizable pattern. These sounds were then not addressed to a specific person. One must therefore assume that Hoover did not know what he was saying.

literature

  • Terrence Deacon: The Symbolic Species . WW Norton & Company, New York 1997, ISBN 0-393-03838-6 .
  • Tim Friend: Animal Talk: Breaking the Codes of Animal Language . Free Press, News York 2004, ISBN 0-7432-0157-4 .
  • Katharina Kramer: “Hey, you! Get outa there! ” In: Mare No. 44, June 2004, pp. 68-69.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Tim Friend: Animal Talk. Pp. 235-236.
  2. ↑ Anthony Hiss: Hoover . The New Yorker , January 3, 1983.
  3. ↑ David Rains Wallace: Neptune's Ark: From Ichthyosaurs to Orcas . University of California Press, Berkeley 2007, ISBN 978-0-520-25814-3 , p. 212.
  4. ↑ Richard Wolkomir: The Seal Who Talks Like a Man . In: Reader's Digest , Vol 124, No 743, March 1984, p. 777.
  5. ↑ Tim Friend: Animal Talk. P. 237.
  6. ↑ a b c Marianne Riedman: The Pinnipeds: Seals, Sea Lions, and Walruses . University of California Press, Berkeley 1990, ISBN 0-520-06497-6 , p. 332.
  7. ↑ Katharina Kramer: “Hey, you! Get outa there! ” P. 68.
  8. ↑ Website of the New England Aquarium ( Memento of the original from February 14, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed on March 23, 2014.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.neaq.org
  9. ↑ Patricia A. Currier: Hoover Will Talk No More; A Delight To Thousands, Aquarium Seal Dies At Age 14 . In: The Boston Globe. July 26, 1985.
  10. ^ Rebecca A. Fitzgerald: Chuck the seal has a lot to say . In: Boston Sunday Globe. September 2, 2007.
  11. ↑ Katharina Kramer: The language talent comes from grandfather . In: Die Zeit , October 7, 2004.
  12. ^ PL Tyack and EH Miller: Vocal Anatomy, Acoustic Communication and Echolocation . In: A. Rus Hoelzel (Ed.): Marine Mammal Biology . Blackwell Science, Malden, Mass. 2002, ISBN 0-632-05232-5 , p. 171.
  13. ^ A b Katherine Ralls, Patricia Fiorelli, Sheri Gish: Vocalizations and vocal mimicry in captive harbor seals, Phoca vitulina ] . In: Canadian Journal of Zoology. 1985, 63 (5), pp. 1050-1056. doi : 10.1139 / z85-157
  14. ↑ C. Lee Hamilton: The use of sound in harbor seal communication . Master's thesis, Humboldt State Univ., Arcadia, Calif. 1981.
  15. ^ W. Tecumseh Fitch: The Evolution of Language . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2010, ISBN 978-0-521-85993-6 , pp. 352-353.
  16. ↑ William T Fitch, Ronald J Schusterman, Colleen Reichmuth, Marija Spasikova, Daniel Mietchen: Vocal Learning in Pinnipeds: A Model System for Human Speech Evolution ( Memento of the original from April 12, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / scitation.aip.org archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . In: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 2008, Vol. 123 (5), p. 3507.
  17. ^ Christine Kenneally: The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language . Viking Penguin, New York 2007, ISBN 978-0-670-03490-1 , p. 146.
  18. ↑ a b Katharina Kramer: Chuck says "Hi" and "How" . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . September 5, 2004.
  19. ↑ Terrence Deacon: The Symbolic Species. P. 225.
  20. ↑ Terrence Deacon: The Symbolic Species. P. 227.
  21. ^ W. Tecumseh Fitch: The Evolution of Language . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2010, ISBN 978-0-521-85993-6 , p. 346.
  22. ↑ Terrence Deacon: The Symbolic Species. P. 228.
  23. ↑ Terrence Deacon: The Symbolic Species. P. 243.