Seals can mimic human speech as they are one of the few mammals able to change the tone of their voices.
A seal
The animals alter the pitch of their calls depending on the sounds of their surroundings, the results of a new study have found.
The seals can also be taught to copy human speech, barking phrases such as "come over here".
Dr. Andrea Ravignani, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, said: "If baby seals acted as most animals, we would just expect them to increase the intensity of their voices as noise increased.
"However, what seals did was lowering the pitch of their voices to escape the frequency range of noise, something that only animals with good control of their larynx - including humans but potentially excluding most mammals - can do."