Elephants greet each other using distinctive names, just like humans: Study

Wild elephants call each other by names, just like humans. A new study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution has revealed that elephants make distinctive, rumbling sounds when they address each other, making them the only non-human animals to possess such an ability to use language. This study was inspired by previous researches that showed bottlenose dolphins could be using signature whistles to call each other.

Mickey Pardo, a biologist at Cornell University, said, "Sometimes another bottlenose dolphin will imitate somebody else's signature whistle in order to get their attention, so effectively calling them by name."

He wanted to check whether elephants, who are known to be vocal mimics, also possess this ability.

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“The idea from the outset of this project was to try to figure out if elephants have names,” said Pardo.

The researchers concluded that elephants use constant, low-frequency rumblings that are "highly structurally variable” to greet each other.

They use particular, distinctive noises for all kinds of communication, from greeting family members to comforting a calf to staying in close proximity to relatives over long distances. “There's quite a lot of variation in their acoustic structure,” he concluded.

To conduct the experiment, Pardo and colleagues analysed recordings of 469 rumbling calls that wild African elephants had made to each other. These sounds were recorded between 1986 and 2022 in the Amboseli National Park and Samburu and Buffalo Springs National Reserves in Kenya.

The team also used machine learning to check whether the rumbles contained any information — precisely a “name”.

Through this model, the team was able to identify the correct elephant recipient of the call 27.5 per cent of the time.

This indicated that “there must be something in the calls that's allowing the model to figure out at least some of the time who that call was addressed to,” Pardo was quoted as saying by NPR.

Then, researchers went a step ahead and made the elephants listen to the sound recordings that supposedly carried their names.

“We had to find a situation where a specific elephant was by herself, or at least not with the individual who made the recording,” Pardo said, explaining that the team then played the recording through a loudspeaker.

It turned out that elephants generally seemed to know that the sound recording was actually a message for them.

“The elephants responded much more strongly on average to playbacks of calls that were originally addressed to them relative to playbacks of calls from the same caller that were originally addressed to someone else,” the researcher said.

However, it was not clear whether all elephants used the same name while addressing the same recipient. “People might assume that elephant names work in exactly the same way as human names, which is not necessarily true,” Pardo warned.

(With inputs from agencies)