It’s not just humans (and aliens in a galaxy far, far away) who love Star Wars. Some clever folk at the Scottish Oceanics Institute found three young seal prodigies and have been teaching them simple song melodies and sounds. Of the three – fantastically named Gandalf, Janice and Zola – the latter proved best at carrying a tune. Watch and listen as Zola belts out the music from Star Wars which traditionally plays over the opening crawl.
But this isn’t just good for a giggle, this could help tackle human speech defects.
Our closest mammalian relatives like apes don’t actually use similar parts of the larynx to create sounds, while seals do.
Biologist Vincent Janik of the Scottish Oceans Institute (SOI) at the University of St Andrews said: “Surprisingly, nonhuman primates have very limited abilities in this domain.”
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“Finding other mammals that use their vocal tract in the same way as us to modify sounds informs us on how vocal skills are influenced by genetics and learning and can ultimately help to develop new methods to study speech disorders.”
Whalesong most famously has been recorded and studied, but it turns out seals are the closest to humans in how they create the sounds.
In the new study, seals were trained to repeat and learns sequences of sounds they would usually make, followed by repeating melodies played to them.
As well as Star Wars, young Jedi Paduan Zola also does a mean Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Perhaps she could also explain how Emperor Palpatine will be coming back.