Across the savannah, elephants call each other by name.
Female elephants talk to each other with individual growls.
Humans have a long history of creating names for elephants. Of course, there’s Disney’s Dumbo, the 19th-century circus attraction Jumbo, and Ruby, the famous painted elephant from Arizona’s Phoenix Zoo. But a new study suggests that wild African elephants can also pick their own names and use them to call and greet each other in the savannah.
most animals Born with a fixed sound For communication. Some species, such as songbirds, can imitate other sounds they hear around them. of a particular species Dolphin and parrot They can learn to imitate human speech for objects in their environment (e.g. Polly wants a cracker). However, much more rare is the ability to assign vocal labels similar to names to fellow members of a flock or pod. Bottlenose dolphins and orange parakeets are thought to make specific sounds to their mates, and unique recipients tend to respond to them. In these cases, however, the call consists simply in the imitation by one animal of the habitual or branded sound characteristics of another animal. (It’s like someone walking around repeating their name over and over again, such as “Mark,” and you imitate that name.) Dolphins may imitate another dolphin’s “characteristic whistle” to get their attention, and the second animal may reacts by repeating the following: That whistle sound.
Now study In ~ Natural ecology and evolution African elephants have been found to engage in a type of communication previously unknown in non-human animals. Researchers used machine learning to analyze 469 touches, greetings and care calls made by Kenya’s wild savannah elephants and found that these animals use specific vocal labels to identify each other. Instead of imitating an individual’s signature call, they create an original sound to announce the identity of a particular elephant.
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“It may seem obvious to me and other elephant researchers that these calls are very specific because we know that specific individuals will respond, but no one did. [previously] Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell, an elephant behavioral ecologist at Harvard Medical School who was not involved in the new study, said:
Most people associate elephants with loud trumpet calls; most common elephant sounds It’s actually a low frequency rumble. Some sounds are so deep that humans cannot detect them. We can only hear downwards. About 20 hertzAnd this sound Down to 5Hz. However, elephants have a unique ear anatomy designed to help them hear distant sounds. 1.5 miles. A female savannah elephant Sophisticated ‘nuclear fusion’ society: Their extended family units separate and rejoin regularly as they follow food sources and avoid predators.
Study co-author and co-founder of the charity ElephantVoices, Joyce Poole, has been studying elephants for nearly 50 years. She has long suspected that animals, which have advanced cognitive abilities and are highly empathetic, grieve and mourn their own deaths. Can imitate human speech, speak to each other from afar with similar names. She said she often saw elephants yelling and only one responding. Others “kept feeding her as if they didn’t even hear her,” Poole says. “I wonder if they’re being rude because they don’t answer, or because they’re actually talking to a specific person.”
Machine learning helped Poole and her colleagues find vocal labels among hundreds of previously recorded female elephant calls. To identify which specific elephants were talking to each other, Poole went back to previous field notes and looked for interactions like “So-and-so was separate from so-and-so and calling so-and-so.” Ultimately, the researchers identified 101 senders and 117 recipients. Next, they measured the acoustic characteristics of the calls to assess whether they contained individual vocal labels. The model was able to predict the specific recipient of a call with a success rate much better than chance. The vocalizations were not simply dolphin-like imitations. Scientists have found no statistical evidence that animals clone each other.
The researchers then verified their findings in the field. They approached 17 wild elephants and played signals to each elephant through speakers. Elephants rarely responded to the “names” of other animals, but responded quickly to their own names. “It’s a very sharp response,” Poole said. “The head spins, the ears pop, the mouth opens wide.”
Michael Pardo, the study’s lead author, is now a behavioral ecologist. Cornell The University noted that researchers could not tell exactly which part of the call labeled an individual, and that data was inconclusive on whether multiple elephants used the same name for an individual. Sometimes the recordings lack sufficient examples, or different elephants use slightly different versions of the same name. To analyze the calls, researchers may need to collect more samples of elephant calls. This is a difficult task that requires spending a lot of time in close proximity to the group being studied. “It’s really difficult to collect this type of data,” says George Wittemyer, the study’s lead author and a biologist at Colorado State University.
Although humans are still just scratching the surface of elephant communication, Wittemyer suggests that the presence of individual vocal labels in these calls indicates an ability for abstract thinking. Moreover, he says the emergence of such labels could help advance our understanding of how human language evolved. In complex societies where members often do not see each other, such as our elephant or hominin ancestors, the need to identify and attract the attention of others may have driven the development of cognitive abilities and language.
“If you can name things without resorting to imitation, it is possible, at least in theory, to talk about a wider range of topics. Because it allows you to come up with names for things and ideas that are potentially inimitable. “There is a sound.” Pardo said.
As O’Connell-Rodwell puts it, “Modifying vocalizations to fit specific individuals can help them engage in conversation. “I would say this is the first step.”
