It is a new investigation in the magazine Nature Ecology and Evolution. It provides evidence that elephants address each other with calls, or names, that are specific to each individual. Yes: elephants are called by their names. How do they do that?
“We thought this was unique to people,” says George Wittemyer. He is a professor of biology at Colorado State University (United States). They reviewed recordings made between 2019 and 2022 in multiple nature reserves. In total, 101 African savanna elephants made 469 different calls to 117 recipients.
Algorithms
Elephants produce a range of vocalizations, from trumpeting and barking to many types of rumbling. Their structures are complicated. Rumbles are low-frequency sounds, partially outside the range of human hearing. They can travel along the ground and last between half a second and 12 seconds. This diversity can contain a lot of information, making it difficult to interpret.
“Elephant names only account for a small part of the variation in the call,” they say. They entered the data into a computer algorithm. What did they find? That calls from the same interlocutor to the same receiver were more similar than calls from the same interlocutor to different receivers. This “indicates that the calls were specific to each recipient,” says Pardo.
But there are still questions. The aim is to know if different elephants use the same name to address the same recipient. Different elephants may use name derivatives to address the same recipient. Something similar to nicknames.
Nicknames
«It’s like human nicknames. Liz, Elizabeth and Ellie have certain traits in common despite being different words. It is possible that different elephants address the same individual with somewhat similar but different labels,” says Pardo.
It is true that to confirm whether elephants are called by their names, the statistical base must be expanded. But the study offers new confirmation of the intelligence of these enormous animals. And their unknown abilities to communicate and think abstractly.
