Do elephants really call each other by name?

THE NURSERY

Research conducted in Kenya has revealed that elephants use personal names.

In a remarkable artificial intelligence experiment with elephants, researchers have successfully demonstrated how the giant mammals call each other by personal names.

According to new research published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, African savannah elephants in Kenya were observed and listened to, using a machine learning program called Sauti za Tembo that analyzed calls made between two groups of elephants.

Research was conducted in Samburu National Park and Amboseli National Park over a period of four years including 14 months of fieldwork, where elephants were tracked and observed and their “calls” recorded. Some 469 unique calls or “roars” were captured from African elephants in the experiment.

What does research reveal about how elephants communicate?

It has long been known that elephants are very social animals.

“The social network of elephants is very rich, incredibly multifaceted, and very complex with this hierarchical structure of different types of relationships and preferences and interactions,” said George Wittemyer, a behavioral ecologist at Colorado State University, one of the institutions involved in Kenyan research. , he told Al Jazeera.

Preliminary observations from researchers conducting the study in Kenya seemed to show that elephants were using a call-and-response communication system. It had been observed that the matriarchs, the female leaders of elephant herds, would make a call, which sounded like a voice, from within the herd and the entire herd would respond.

However, moments later the same herdsman would give another such roar and only one elephant away from the herd would respond as he hurried back to the herd.

“And so in those situations, it’s obvious to the observer, to us on the ground, that something happened there that everyone in the group knew about,” Wittemyer said. “The call was directed to this other person. That person received it and realized that it was the same, answered and came to the group. And so you wonder, ‘are they using names?’

Studies have suggested that there may be a unique identifier embedded in elephant roars that each elephant can recognize. These unique sounds are believed to be similar to how humans identify each other.

Wittemyer noted: “Maybe we greet each other by our names, but it’s not like we use names constantly once we’re focused, once we’re immersed in a conversation. And it looks like that’s the case with elephants too.

How were elephant sounds recorded?

Although humans are familiar with the loud trumpeting sounds of elephants, some elephant sounds are low-pitched, meaning they use frequencies too low for humans to hear. Therefore, special equipment was used to record and analyze the noise. “They use vocal cords and they make these sounds, but the structure of those sounds is very different from ours,” Wittemyer explained.

Expert AI learning software was used to identify specific, unique names used to refer to certain elephants, appearing within the roars. Using this software, the researchers were able to determine that names were being used in the calls between the elephants in about a third (27.5 percent) of the “calls”.

Identifying and understanding other parts of the rumble will require additional research.

During the experiment, the researchers played a sound from a speaker that they believed was the elephant’s “name,” and the elephant would respond by lifting its head, flapping its ears, and humming back as it walked toward the speaker.

In other cases, when the call from the speaker was not their “name”, the researchers found, the elephant could take its head, but the response was under the condition of behavior.

Do other animals use similar signals?

Not exactly. While dolphins and parrots mimic the sounds of others in their species to communicate, elephants are the first non-human animals known to use unique names independent of mimicry.

In another report published last month by the journal Nature Communications, researchers analyzed thousands of recorded calls made by sperm whales, revealing a “phonetic alphabet” within their sequence of “click” sounds. The discovery shows that sperm whales use more complex communication systems, known as “codas”, than previously believed.

Unlike humpback whales that “sing”, sperm whales make clicking sounds, using a process known as echolocation where sound waves bounce off distant objects and return to the whale so it can identify where the object is. Whales use echolocation to hunt and navigate in the deep ocean.