Media release

From: Springer Nature

African elephants address each other with name-like calls 

Wild African savannah elephants (Loxodonta africana) may address each other with name-like calls that, similar to personal names used by humans, do not appear to imitate sounds made by the individual being addressed, according to new research in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Non-human species such as dolphins and parrots have been observed addressing each other by imitating sounds made by the recipient of their calls, but only humans are known to address each other using names.

Michael Pardo and colleagues used machine-learning methods to analyse recordings of 469 calls (‘rumbles’) made by wild African elephant female–offspring groups in the Amboseli National Park and Samburu and Buffalo Springs National Reserves in Kenya between 1986 and 2022. The machine-learning model correctly identified the recipients of 27.5% of these calls, which the authors note is a higher percentage than the model detected when being fed a control audio. Pardo and colleagues suggest that elephants may address each other using individual-specific calls that do not rely on imitation of noises made by the individual being addressed.

The authors also compared the reactions of 17 wild elephants in response to recordings of calls that were either originally addressed to them or another elephant. They observed that elephants approached the speaker playing the recordings more quickly and responded more vocally in response to calls originally addressed to them, compared to those originally addressed to another elephant. This suggests that elephants recognise individual calls addressed to them.

The authors suggest that further research is needed to investigate the contexts in which elephants use name-like calls and propose that understanding this could help to illuminate the origins of these calls in both humans and elephants.