Do elephants in the wild have names? And do they know each other’s names and use them to more effectively communicate?
That’s the hypothesis posed in the latest edition of the scientific journal Nature Ecology & Evolution after scientists began studying the distinctive noises elephants use to talk to each other.
“Sometimes another bottlenose dolphin will imitate somebody else's signature whistle in order to get their attention, so effectively calling them by name,” Cornell University biologist Mickey Pardo told NPR when discussing the genesis of this research.
Elephants could possess the same abilities since they also are known to mimic each other’s sounds, so Pardo set out to “try and figure out if elephants have names” that they use for each other.
While the sounds elephants are most known for are the higher-pitched trumpeting sounds made through their trunks, the behemoths also emit near-constant lower-register rumbles.
“The rumbles themselves are highly structurally variable,” says Pardo, who was at Colorado State University when he conducted this research. “There's quite a lot of variation in their acoustic structure.”
The researchers studied recordings of 469 different elephant rumbles, sounds the animals made while communicating with each other at Amboseli National Park and both the Samburu and Buffalo Springs National Reserves in Kenya.
The recordings were collected for over 35 years, between 1986 and 2022.
And after using computer models and machine learning to detect unique patterns within the sounds, they found that elephants had strong reactions to the clips that featured what researchers determined could be their “names.”