How elephants call each other by name

Elephants use a specific sound for each other when they communicate with each other. This is the conclusion of a new study published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Trumpeting and growling

Elephants don't just trumpet, they also produce a low growl. American biologist Michael Pardo (Colorado State University) and a research team analyzed 469 of these sounds using AI. The recordings were made between 1986 and 2022 in three African reserves.

Elephants aren't the only animals that communicate with each other. Dolphins and parrots, for example, also 'talk' to each other, but in doing so, they imitate each other's sounds. Only people have been shown to call each other by names. So it turns out that elephants do that too.

Machine learning software

With the algorithms, the team was able to identify which elephant was called with a certain growl in 27.5 percent of the cases. The team also made their own recordings, says Pardo in conversation with the NOS Jeugdjournaal. “We spent a lot of time in Kenya, following elephants with a pickup truck. And we recorded all the sounds they made.”

The team then fed those sounds into a computer and released the machine learning algorithms. Pardo: “To find out if we could discover patterns that could mean a kind of name. And by watching them, we tried to find out who they spoke to or who they called when they made that noise.”

Elephant reactions

The researchers went one step further. They went back to the elephants with their recordings and played them to see how the animals would react. “We found that they responded more to a sound that was originally addressed to themselves than to a call that was meant for someone else. That means they can hear whether an invocation is meant for them or not.”

The elephants mainly use the name sounds to call each other from a distance or to address calves. The research team saw the animals react in different ways. “Sometimes you saw them lift their heads and looked around. It also happened that they called something back. And sometimes they ran off the sound.”

Follow-up research needed

The researchers don't know how the growled elephant names come about, but Pardo does have a theory. “We think they're getting that call from their mother. That's a gamble, but shortly after giving birth, we saw elephant mothers shouting a lot to their newborn cubs, over and over again. Adult elephants don't always use those names, but when they have calves, they shout much more often.”

The researchers emphasize that more research is needed into the context in which elephants use the “names”. This could help to better understand the origin of name-calling in both humans and elephants, they write.

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