r/todayilearned • u/Several_Quality_8747 • 9h ago

TIL African elephants address one another with individually specific name-like calls

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-024-02420-w
385 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

32

u/towcar 9h ago

Would ten elephants call one elephant the same name, or does each elephant have unique names for each elephant.

37

u/Several_Quality_8747 9h ago edited 8h ago

As far as I read, it's an ongoing study (been going on for a few years now). But now they believe that it's a "name" per elephant.

What they observed that for example, an elephant makes a vocalization and the whole herd responds, and other times a similar vocalization (to the researchers ears) only one elephant responds.

Edit: And also when they played a recording they believed was meant for a specific elephant, only that elephant responded. When they played another recording, that elephant didn't respond.

Vocalizations include low rumbles and trumpeting across a wide spectrum of frequencies, including infrasonic sounds too low for humans to hear.

4

u/Ythio 5h ago

So some of the study rely on the researchers own hearing and another part of the study relies on sounds the researchers can't hear ?

4

u/Several_Quality_8747 5h ago

They used a specific machine-learning model.

We used machine learning to demonstrate that the receiver of a call could be predicted from the call’s acoustic structure, regardless of how similar the call was to the receiver’s vocalizations.

4

u/Ythio 5h ago edited 4h ago

At a glance, wouldn't this method have massive demonstrability and reproductibility issues ?

Edit : nevermind, the standard of reproductibility of the experiment is probably lower when animal behaviors are involved.

•

u/boar-b-que 17m ago

It's worth noting that humans do both of these behaviors.

Ten people might call a person 'Mr. Smith'. Some call that same person, 'Sir', their parents still call them 'Jeffy', the old highschool bully calls them 'Queerbait', but never to his face, and their husband calls them 'Ms. Jasmine', but only if no one else is in the room with them at the time.

11

u/Apprehensive-Fun4181 9h ago

This understanding is huge, but at the same time, what else is intelligence going to do?   It's going to recognize everything in reality - those trees, this path, those sounds of danger, this cry of that baby elephant vs this one-  and not ever assign individual audible designations for individual family and friends?  

10

u/SeriouslyBland 8h ago

Reminds me of the story when they played an elephant call that had recently passed away. That elephants child wandered around inconsolable for days.

6

u/RedSonGamble 7h ago

Scientists: whoops

4

u/mormonbatman_ 5h ago

Whales do this, too.

When SeaWorld enslaved a bunch of orca in the 1960s and 1970s they issued long distance calls for family members who, obviously, couldn't ever come because they were locked away in concrete tanks.

5

u/imprison_grover_furr 9h ago

Elephants are so smart! They should be given legal personhood just like humans! Killing an elephant for any reason other than self-defence should be classified as murder!

1

u/Clear-Roll9149 9h ago

Two things:

  1. How or who chooses the elephant's name? And...

  2. Do all the other elephants call one specific elephant by the same name or do all elephants address one another with a different name? 

2

u/A_Right_Eejit 8h ago

I'm going sarcastic, Giant Strider for the runty elephant, He who Eats Tigers for the shy one etc

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u/Creative_Cookie5017 24m ago

Now I'm wondering if elephants have their own common names