African elephants use unique names to call each other: Study
- The individualized calls, or names, don't just mimic other elephants
- Recordings of calls were collected over nearly 20 years
- Elephants responded faster when their names played back to them
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(NewsNation) — Wild African savannah elephants use unique sounds to call for each other in the same way humans use names, a new study suggests.
The study, published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, found elephants use individualized calls to address each other rather than mimicking the unique cry of the animal they are calling for.
Most animals, like dolphins and parrots, rely on mimicry to communicate or call out to one another, meaning the discovery of unique names among elephants could “have important implications for our understanding of language evolution.”
Researchers studied calls, or rumbles, made between wild groups of females and their calves in Amboseli National Park and Samburu and Buffalo Springs National Reserves between 1986 and 2022.
Three rumbles were recorded and analyzed:
- “Contact,” which is used to call an elephant that’s far away
- “Greeting,” for when elephants are within touching distance of each other
- “Caregiver,” a rumble used by elephants caring for a younger one
Hundreds of rumbles were analyzed acoustically, with the machine-learning model correctly identifying the recipient elephant 27.5% of the time.
Though that may seem smaller than expected, researchers claim it widely outperforms the statistics a randomized acoustic test would get.
The researchers also tested elephant reaction to rumble playbacks, finding that elephants approached, vocalized and rumbled more when their unique call was played to them.
