In a study as amazing as it is probably unsurprising, a team of biologists and researchers using machine learning tools discovered that elephants call each other by names.<\/p>\n
For an animal that is known to perform deeply social acts like grieving, raising children collectively, and communicating across miles of countryside using complex low-frequency vocalizations, the use of names seems to be natural for their societies, but being able to know an elephant\u2019s name in \u2018Elephantese\u2019 offers the potential to dramatically reduce human-elephant conflict.<\/p>\n
The study was conducted at Colorado State University and was organized around simple observations that the matriarch of an elephant herd the researchers were following in Kenya would use a call that brought all the elephants together around her.<\/p>\n
However, sometimes a perfectly similar call would draw only a single elephant out of the group.<\/p>\n
To investigate if this had something to do with a naming custom, the scientists from CSU, Save the Elephants, and ElephantVoices used machine learning to analyze and group vocalizations into those they suspected were meant for multiple members of the herd, and those meant for an individual.<\/p>\n
When the researchers played recorded calls, CSU press reports, elephants responded affirmatively to calls that were addressed to them by calling back or approaching the speaker. Calls meant for other elephants received less of a reaction.<\/p>\n
In animal vocal ethnology, using a name is considered an \u201carbitrary communication\u201d says study co-author George Wittemyer, a professor at CSU\u2019s Warner College of Natural Resources and chairman of the scientific board of Save the Elephants, which means a sound that represents an idea but doesn\u2019t imitate it.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf all we could do was make noises that sounded like what we were talking about, it would vastly limit our ability to communicate,\u201d said Wittemyer.<\/p>\n
What arbitrary means in this case is that the sound made when a name is called could be absolutely anything\u2014it\u2019s just something to be assigned to a thing or a person, and is believed to indicate thought abstraction, a sign of higher intelligence.<\/p>\n
In the evolutionary past of both humans and elephants, complex social frameworks demanded precision communication.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s probably a case where we have similar pressures, largely from complex social interactions,\u201d Wittemyer said. \u201cThat\u2019s one of the exciting things about this study, it gives us some insight into possible drivers of why we evolved these abilities.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kurt Fristrup, a research scientist in CSU\u2019s Walter Scott, Jr. College of Engineering, is also excited about the findings because they present the opportunity to understand what kinds of acoustic features are used in elephant communication as \u201cdescriptors\u201d of herd members.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur finding that elephants are not simply mimicking the sound associated with the individual they are calling was the most intriguing,\u201d Fristrup said. \u201cThe capacity to utilize arbitrary sonic labels for other individuals suggests that other kinds of labels or descriptors may exist in elephant calls.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lastly, Wittemyer believes that developing a rudimentary address book of all the elephants in a given region would allow for unprecedented opportunities to manage human-elephant conflicts, as the individual animals in the study consistently responded with great acuity to the sounds of their names.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s tough to live with elephants, when you\u2019re trying to share a landscape and they\u2019re eating crops,\u201d Wittemyer said. \u201cI\u2019d like to be able to warn them, \u2018Do not come here. You\u2019re going to be killed if you come here.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
In April, scientists were confident they had a conversation with a humpback whale, suggesting humanity may be on the cusp of entering an age of conversational capacity with animals who share our world.<\/p>\n