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Greetings!
Our groundbreaking new collaborative study on African elephant communication has revealed that just like us, elephants have names for each other too!
Our research, carried out in Kenya by a team from ElephantVoices, Save the Elephants and Colorado State University, used machine learning to reveal that elephants address each other with individually specific calls dubbed ‘vocal labels.’ Our study, which provides unprecedented insights into animal cognition and the evolution of language, has today been published in the prestigious scientific journal, Nature Ecology & Evolution.
Elephants, like humans, maintain strong bonds with family members and associates, and it now seems that they have independently evolved a sophisticated mechanism for individually addressing them. Our findings suggest that features in the social environments that are common to both human and elephant ancestors may have led them to develop this rare ability.
During the study, we recorded vocalisations from individually known wild African elephants from two different populations in Kenya: Amboseli National Park, where the Amboseli Trust for Elephants has studied elephants for five decades and where most of the calls in the ElephantVoices database were recorded and Samburu National Reserve, where Save the Elephants has its main research base. The ultimate dataset comprised 469 distinct calls. Among these, 101 unique callers and 117 unique receivers were identified.
Our colleagues at Colorado State University and Save the Elephants used a type of machine learning algorithm known as a Random Forest, to uncover a distinctive "vocal label" in elephant calls, similar to a name. When these calls were played back, the elephants responded energetically to those addressed to them, approaching the source and vocalising in response - further supporting the existence of ‘vocal labels’. Calls meant for others were met with less enthusiasm and reduced vocalisation, highlighting elephants’ capability to recognize and respond to their own names.
Our findings add to a growing list of capabilities that further our understanding of elephants’ cognitive and communicative sophistication.
There is a link to the full scientific paper in our press release.
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