Elephants Have Names Too!

A new collaborative study has shown that African savanna elephants address one another by name, much like humans do. During recent fieldwork, an Amboseli Trust for Elephants team recorded vocalizations from individually known wild African elephants from two different populations in Kenya. An organization called Elephant Voices recorded in Amboseli National Park, where the Amboseli Trust for Elephants has studied pachyderms for five decades, and a Colorado State University team recorded in the Samburu National Reserve, where Save the Elephants has its main research base. The ultimate dataset comprised 469 distinct calls from which 101 unique callers and 117 unique receivers were identified.

Using machine learning the researchers concluded that elephants address each other with unique calls, termed "vocal labels." The study offers unprecedented insights into animal cognition and the evolution of language and was published in Nature Ecology & Evolution earlier this month.