Wild African elephants call each other by their names, according to a study published today Nature Ecology and Evolution — They are the only non-human animals known to use such language.
From childhood, we learn words that represent people, objects, feelings and ideas. But if you repeat a word – even your own name – too many times, it starts Meaningless words. Most words are, after all, no more than an arbitrary collection of words.
Our ability to create and share vocal labels like names is part of what makes us human. Until now such arbitrary vocal labeling was be thoughtful Unique to humans.
including a handful of animal species Bottlenose dolphin And the parrot, can address each other using vocal calls. These calls, or catchphrases, are used to shout out the caller own Identity, not of other beings. To get a given person’s attention, a dolphin can imitate another dolphin’s signature call — it works, but not what we do.
If your friend constantly says, “What’s up, buddy?” And since you’re both dolphins, you can refer to them in the third person as “whatsup dude.” Since you’re not a dolphin, you’ll probably call them something like “Kyle” instead. Scientists believe that this cognitive leap takes more effort than imitation alone, making it an extremely rare event in the animal world.
If elephants are intelligent enough to learn each other’s names, they may have deep social bonds, complex thinking, and a desire to connect with others — just like us. Findings like this heap on the front A mountain of evidence We should rethink our current relationship with animals like elephants.
“I honestly think we’ve scratched the surface of it,” says the behavioral ecologist Mickey Pardois a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University and lead author of the study, which was conducted in collaboration with seven other researchers.
Elephants call each other by name
elephants live close social group, centered around matriarchal herds and their calves. They form strong bonds with social networks associated with 50 or more elephants. “Their social relationships are an incredibly important part of their ecology,” says Pardo.
Like humans, elephants are not always physically close to their best friends and family. They don’t need phones to communicate at a distance — thanks to their booming voices, elephants can make loud, low-frequency grunts. Travel through the ground as seismic waves Approaching the elephant Up to 6 km away (about 3.75 miles) At that distance, out of sight, a caller must indicate to whom they are sending their message.
Pardo thought that elephants’ complex social relationships, and the need to recognize each other from a distance, pushed elephants to learn. Call each other by their names.
To find out, Pardo recorded elephant vocalizations from groups of wild adult females and their calves across two field sites in Kenya, noting which elephants were calling and to whom. Elephants make a lot of noise in addition to their iconic trumpeting. Here, the researchers focused on harnessing the rich, low-frequency rumble of elephants mail to each other from a distance, to greet each other Up close, and to comfort their children.
The team trained a machine-learning algorithm to match rumble calls to the elephants they are directed at (“receivers”). When given an unlabeled rumble, the algorithm was able to guess the identity of the recipient elephant with 27.5 percent accuracy—significantly better than chance. That number may seem relatively low, but Pardo said they don’t expect the model to be completely accurate. They probably aren’t saying each other’s names every time they roll into each other.
The greeting rumble — the elephant equivalent of saying “hi” — was the worst at predicting the recipient’s identity, which makes sense. When I meet a friend at a bar, I rarely say, “Hello, insert name here!” “Hey, nice to see you!” Usually does the trick and so can elephants. It is possible that the machine-learning tools used in this study simply did not capture all the nuances of confusion. They relied on a supervised learning algorithm, which assigns recordings to predefined name labels, rather than discovering patterns on its own. In the future, other techniques such as deep learning may uncover more, but will require much more training data.
Elephants don’t have signature calls like dolphins and parrots, but each elephant’s voice has a unique tone and character, much like ours. Pardo’s team used their classification algorithm to see if the elephants were actually using a distinct sound to call their friends, beyond just copying the receiver. In fact, they found that vocal labeling in elephants probably doesn’t rely on mimicry — but without a broader understanding of elephant language, it’s hard to know for sure.
Calls from the same receiver were more similar to each other than calls from different receivers, lending further support to the idea that an elephant’s name represents its identity to the entire group. However, the similarity between callers was not very strong, suggesting that different elephants may refer to a given individual by different names. That said, wild elephants primarily respond to recordings of calls addressed to them, meaning these calls must carry some uniquely identifying information.
Although people usually use the same label for a given person — my name is Celia, and everyone calls me Celia — this is not always the case. My partner’s given name is Andrew, but most people who have met him in the last five years call him Rowan. To some extent, that vocal label depends on the social context and the depth and nature of their relationship. Elephants can be similar.
An elephant’s roar is information-dense: A 30-second recording may contain the name of an elephant, but it can contain much more. Given the relatively limited amount of data Pardo’s team had access to, machine-learning techniques could only assign a recording to the elephant’s name most closely matching it. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
Imagine getting a noisy voice memo in a completely unfamiliar language and trying to pick out a specific word from that collection of words – it’s hard. Daniela HedwigK. Lisa Young, director of the Elephant Listening Project at the Center for Conservation Bioacoustics, thinks the next step will be to determine exactly how individual pieces of information are encoded in the acoustics of these recordings.
“If we can understand how elephants are encoding names in calls,” Pardo said, “it will open up many more avenues of investigation.”
Can this be used as evidence of elephant personality?
In 2022, the New York State Supreme Court ruled that an elephant is not a legal person. Filed by the Non-Human Rights Project Habeas corpus Case for Happy, an elephant living in isolation at the Bronx Zoo, arguing for his right to be freed from illegal detention.
They lost. Monica Miller, Happy’s attorney at the Human Rights Project, wasn’t surprised. Humans have certain basic rights because they are human, and in many ways, seen as animals Property under law. Miller doubts that this deeply ingrained sense of human exceptionalism would prevent a judge from granting an elephant the right to personal autonomy. “Even if an elephant could write a law school essay, they’d say ‘no,’ because they’re an elephant.”
Demonstrating that an animal engages in complex communication is not enough to make people care about them. Ants use a highly sophisticated chemical language To coordinate some of the most impressive collective actions in the animal kingdom, but we still kill about a billion (roughly estimated) ants every day. Ants don’t get lawyers.
They received the signatures of 287 scientists, philosophers and ethicists, including Pardo. in April, New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness launched at a conference at New York University, stating that “there is strong scientific support for the attribution of conscious experience to other mammals and birds” and that “at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience” exists in all vertebrates and most invertebrates. The announcement aims, in part, to encourage people to consider the implications of studies like Pardo’s on animal welfare policy.
Pardo spent time in the field collecting recordings of elephant calls in the wild Samburu National Reserve In Kenya, he said, the biggest cause of elephant deaths in the area was human-elephant conflict. “The conflict between man and animal is the worst. And it gets worse every year,” said Mike Lesil, a ranger at Samburu National Reserve said Sierra. “We chased Somali poachers, organized crime groups and local thieves hired by ivory traders. Now most of the elephants are killed by local herdsmen fighting with wild animals for pasture and water.”
“The more we learn about elephant behavior and needs, the better informed conflict mitigation strategies can be, taking both human perspectives into account. And elephant” Joshua Plotnika professor at Emory University who studies the evolution of cognition across species, wrote in an email.
In theory, findings like Pardo’s could open the door to literal human-elephant communication. More realistically, he hopes it will inspire people to invest in conservation efforts and rethink their relationship with elephants—both in their native habitat and in captivity. “I think we really need a big revolution in how we think about other animals,” he told me. Given the complexity of their social lives in the wild, Pardo no longer believes it is ethical to keep elephants in captivity.
Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative) is currently taking a similar approach to animal cognition research, decoding sperm whale vocalizations to promote conservation efforts. It all rests on the hope that if scientists can prove that an animal does something we once thought uniquely human, we’ll be more motivated to care.
As humans, we tend to empathize with animals that feel the same way we do. “People often appreciate only what they understand,” Pardo said, “and they often only appreciate what they understand.”
“Evidence that they are able to name each other, to have their own concept, and then to create a symbol for themselves, is a level of autonomy that we would recognize as deserving of protection in court,” Miller said. “Rights fall from this understanding.”
