Elephants appear to use personalized calls to address members of their group, providing a rare example of naming in animals other than humans. “There is much more sophistication in the lives of animals than we often realize,” says Michael Pardo, a behavioral ecologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. “Elephant communication may be even more complex than we imagined.”
Other than humans, few animals give each other names. Bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) and orange-fronted parakeets (Eupsittula canicularis) are known to identify each other by imitating the characteristic calls of those they are addressing. In contrast, humans use names that have no inherent association with the people or objects they refer to. Pardo suspected that elephants might also have names for each other, due to their extensive vocal communication and rich social relationships.
To find out, Pardo and his colleagues recorded, between 1986 and 2022, the deep roars of wild female African savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana) and their calves in Amboseli National Park in southern Kenya and the Samburu and Buffalo National Reserves. Springs, in the north of the country. The findings were published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution.
The researchers analyzed recordings of 469 roars using a machine learning technique. The model correctly identified which elephant was being called 27.5% of the time — a much higher success rate than when the model was fed random audio as a control. This suggests that the roars carry information intended only for a specific elephant.
The next question for the team involves figuring out how elephants encode information in their calls. This “would open up a whole host of other questions we could ask,” Pardo says, like whether elephants also name places or even talk about each other in the third person.
© Photo by David Heiling on Unsplash
