U.S. Navy

The white whale known as NOC used its nasal passages to make humanlike sounds.

The noise sounds like the kind of "dum-diddy-dah" tune folks might sing to themselves while they're strolling along the beach — but it's actually the voice of a white beluga whale, mimicking human conversation by blurping air through its blowhole. The strange case of the whale named NOC marks the first time that scientists could study a marine mammal in the very act of "talking" like a human, using a most unhuman method.

"I think he was looking for feedback," Sam Ridgway, president of the National Marine Mammal Foundation, told me. "These animals make a lot of sound, and they like feedback."

For years, NOC was part of the U.S. Navy's Marine Mammal Program in San Diego, which was aimed at studying whether whales, dolphins, seals and other marine mammals could do underwater reconnaissance or perhaps even disable mines. NOC was captured in 1977 in Canada's Hudson Bay and brought down to California to work with researchers and divers. (He was the smallest of the pack, and Ridgway says that led to the nickname "no-see-um," or NO-C for short.)

Seven years later, the researchers noticed that NOC spontaneously started making unusual sounds — "as if two people were conversing in the distance just out of range for our understanding," they reported in the journal Current Biology. One time, a diver came to the surface outside NOC's enclosure and asked his colleagues, "Who told me to get out?" They soon concluded it was the whale, which must have been saying "Out, out, out."

That led Ridgway and other researchers to make a series of recordings of NOC's sounds, at the surface and underwater. They found that the pitch and the amplitude rhythm was similar to human speech. "Whale voice prints were similar to human voice and unlike the whale's usual sounds," Ridgway said in a news release. "The sounds we heard were clearly an example of vocal learning by the white whale."

Although this was way out of the norm for whales, it's not unheard of: Back in the 1940s, biologists reported that whale calls could occasionally sound like the voices of children shouting in the distance. In the 1970s, there was a beluga whale at the Vancouver Aquarium that could reportedly make sounds like garbled Russian or Chinese, and even say his name ("Lugosi"). However, NOC afforded the first opportunity to study scientifically how a whale could make such sounds.

The San Diego researchers hooked up pressure sensors inside and just above NOC's nasal cavity. The readings suggested that the whale varied the air pressure inside the nasal tract, expelling air through vibrating phonic lips to make the kinds of sounds that come from a human's vocal cords. In short, the whale had figured out an alien way to talk like a human.

"We do not claim that our whale was a good mimic compared to such well-known mimics as parrots or mynah birds," the researchers write. "However, the sonic behavior we observed is an example of vocal learning by the white whale. It seems likely that NOC's close association with humans played a role in how often he employed his human voice, as well as in its quality."

About four years after NOC started talking like a human, he stopped. The whale continued to vocalize, but those sounds were just the typical whistles, squawks, rasps, yelps and barks. In 1999, NOC died. "We never got his best speech imitation" on tape, Ridgway said — but the existing recordings were more than enough to set the researcher thinking about the potential.

"Whether or not the whale knows what he's saying, other than mimicking what he heard, probably should be explored further," Ridgway told me. "Certainly I think there's a lot we could learn about their sound production. What we'd like, primarily, is for them to tell us how they interact with their ocean environment. How deep can you dive? How long can you stay underwater? What frequencies can you hear? Can you hear the same sounds at the surface and at depth? Describe what you observe with your sonar."

Japanese researchers are already working on a dolphin speech translator. Maybe a talking whale isn't that far behind. But what would the dolphins and the whales tell us? "Thanks for all the fish"? Or "thanks for nothing, you damn dirty humans"?

More about animal intelligence:

• Audio: Listen to the whale that talked like a human
• Dolphins appear to do nonlinear mathematics
• Studies focus on what animals are thinking
• There's more than one path to intelligence
• Gallery: The world's 10 smartest species
• Flash interactive: All about whales

In addition to Ridgway, the authors of "Spontaneous Human Speech Mimicry by a Cetacean" include Donald Carder, Michelle Jeffries and Mark Todd.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Daily Echo via BNPS.co.uk

Eight-year-old Charlie Naysmith shows off the piece of ambergris he found on the beach at Hengistbury Head on the coast of southern England.

An 8-year-old boy in England could be up to $63,000 richer, thanks to a piece of solidified whale vomit he picked up on the beach. The chunk may look like a yellow-brownish rock, but it's actually a primo piece of ambergris, an expensive perfume ingredient that is, um, spewed out by whales.

Charlie Naysmith stumbled upon the loaf-sized lump at Hengistbury Head, on the southern coast of England, the Bournemouth Echo reported over the weekend.

As far as Charlie was concerned, it was just a seaside curiosity. But after doing some research, he and his family determined that the curious lump could be worth somewhere between £10,000 and £40,000 ($15,850 to $63,350).

"We have discovered it is quite rare and are waiting for some more information from marine biology experts," the boy's father, Alex, told the Echo.

Charlie is reportedly thinking about using the money to build a house for animals. But first, he and his parents might want to get that expert opinion. It turns out that the ambergris trade can get pretty sticky.

'Floating Gold'
Ambergris is a waxy, bile-like substance that builds up in the intestines of sperm whales, apparently to ease the passage of hard material such as squid beaks through a whale's digestive tract. It's often characterized as whale vomit, and although that's fine as a family-friendly description, the stuff is more widely thought to come out of the whale's back end rather than its front end.

Fresh ambergris smells like fresh whale poop, but after a long period of seasoning and hardening in the ocean, it takes on a more delicate odor. It's been variously compared to the aroma of tobacco, the scent of an old wooden church, the fragrance of seaweed, or the smell of rubbing alcohol without the pungency.

"The problem with trying to describe the smell of ambergris is that it really only smells like ambergris," Christopher Kemp, a biologist and neuroscientist who's written a book about the substance, told Bloomberg Businessweek's Eric Spitznagel.

The title of Kemp's book? "Floating Gold."

The scent of ambergris is what makes it so valuable. The substance has been used as an incense, fragrance, flavoring, remedy or aphrodisiac in many cultures, going back to ancient Egypt and China. Herman Melville devoted a whole chapter of "Moby Dick" (Chapter 92) to a discussion of ambergris and how highly prized it was in 19th-century society. "Who would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale!" Melville wrote.

More recently, ambergris — or ambrein, a compound extracted from ambergris — has been used as a fixative or fragrance amplifier rather than the main ingredient in perfumes. Ambergris' selling price has been quoted at $10 to $50 per gram, depending on the quality of the specimen. (The Echo estimates that the lump found at Hengistbury Head weighs about 600 grams, which suggests that Charlie shouldn't count on building a $63,000 house for his animals.)

Underground trade
The bad news is that the trade in ambergris isn't what it used to be, in large part due to the endangered status of sperm whales. By some accounts, it's illegal to sell the stuff in many jurisdictions, including the United States. There are some traders who dispute that interpretation of anti-whaling laws, but the stigma has driven perfume companies to look for plant-based substitutes such as labdanum, or synthetic scents such as Ambrox. (University of British Columbia researchers reported earlier this year that a balsam-fir gene may provide a path to cheaper ambergris-like compounds.)

Maybe it's the whiff of illegality, or maybe it's just that the stuff is so expensive — but for whatever reason, there's a clandestine character to the modern-day ambergris market. One of the subjects Kemp interviewed for his book is a full-time dealer on New Zealand's North Island, named Adrienne Beuse. Last year, she was involved in a huge ambergris deal that probably saw hundreds of thousands of dollars change hands. "It was a lot of money — that's all I can say," one of the sellers said.

The way Beuse tells it, New Zealand's choicest hunting grounds for ambergris are ruled by a gang of aggressive collectors and traders — a gang that doesn't shy away from violence to defend their turf. "They're called the Beach Mafia up here," Kemp quotes Beuse as saying. "They claim a proprietary interest in the beach. They are defending, I guess in their minds, their territory. And it's worth a lot of money. If a piece worth $50,000 washes up, they don't want anyone else to find it."

It sounds as if Charlie is lucky to live in southern England rather than northern New Zealand. But he better watch his back.

More about whales:

• TODAY video: Humpback whale 'waves' at boaters
• Flash interactive: All about whales
• Whale poo: Miracle grow for the ocean
• Dog stars in killer-whale stress study

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.