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Scientists have found evidence with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) tools that elephants have their own names that they use to address each other. The findings have put them among a few animals which give each other names. However, like humans, and unlike these animals, elephants address one another without imitating the addressee’s calls.
The study, ‘African elephants address one another with individually specific name-like calls’, was published in the journal Nature on June 10. It was carried out by Michael Pardo, Kurt Fristrup and George Wittemyer of Colorado State University (US), David Lolchuragi and Iain Douglas-Hamilton of Save The Elephants (Kenya), Joyce Poole and Petter Granl of ElephantVoices (Norway), and Cynthia Moss of Amboseli Elephant Research Project (Kenya)
Speaking to Nature, Pardo said, “There’s a lot more sophistication in animal lives than we are typically aware of… Elephants’ communication may be even more complex than we previously realised.”
Here is a look at how the study was conducted, and its significance.
How was the study conducted?
Contrary to common perception, the majority of vocal sounds by an elephant are the rumble — low-pitched, thrumming sounds — and not trumpets, which are essentially emotional outbursts, according to the researchers.
Pardo told The New York Times that rumbles are more meaningful and are used in a host of different social situations. That’s why to verify if elephants come up with names for each other, the researchers examined rumbles.
Between 1986 and 2022, they recorded the rumbles of wild female African savannah elephants and their offspring in Amboseli National Park in southern Kenya, and in the Samburu and Buffalo Springs National Reserves in the country’s north.
They then analysed recordings of 469 rumbles by feeding them into an AI model — it is difficult for human ears to differentiate rumbles.
“What we were trying to do with that model is to see if we could predict who a call was addressed to just by the sound properties of the call…Then we would be able to conclude … the calls contain some information that identifies the intended receiver. In other words, a name,” Pardo told the CBC News.
The AI model successfully identified which elephant was being addressed 27.5% of the time, which was much higher than when the model was fed random audio recordings of the elephants. This showed that some rumbles consisted of information that was intended only for a specific elephant.
The researchers supplemented their analysis by playing recordings of rumbles to 17 elephants and compared their reactions. They observed that the individual elephants reacted more strongly when they heard their ‘name’ compared with when they heard rumbles directed at other elephants.
“I was super excited,” Pardo told The NYT. “Especially when we got the playback results, because I think that’s the strongest piece of evidence that the elephants can actually tell, just from hearing the call, if it was intended for them or not, and they respond more strongly to the calls that were originally directed to them.”
The researchers also did not find any evidence that elephants were imitating the calls of the receiver. Animals like parrots and dolphins identify each other by imitating the signature calls of those they are addressing. This is different from how humans address each other — if your name is Ramesh, you most likely did not get the name because you say “Ramesh” repeatedly.
The researchers, however, do not know where the elephant names are located within a rumble. They are also not sure if elephants have names for other objects.
Why is the study significant?
Researchers have said that the findings showcase the fact that elephants have much higher intellectual capabilities than humans estimate. Moreover, they also demonstrate the similarities between humans and elephants. This could increase “humans’ appreciation for elephants at a time when conflict with humans is one of the biggest threats to wild elephant survival,” Pardo wrote in The Conversation.
