Elephants May Communicate Using Names
Humans love to give things names. We name our children, our pets and sometimes even our cars.
But according to a new study, we may not be the only ones.
Research published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution has suggested that elephants give each other names and communicate using them.
That would make them the only other species known to do this.
Elephants communicate using a number of different sounds, including their famous trumpeting noise. But they also use other sounds that are at a pitch so low that humans can't hear them.
The researchers had a large number of elephant sounds that had been collected at two locations in Kenya.
They used machine learning to find out more about the noises they heard. This helped them identify 469 unique elephant "calls."
Michael Pardo, who led the study, said the research shows that elephants use specific calls for each individual. They also recognize and react when a call is addressed to them, and ignore calls that are addressed to others.
The researchers also found that elephants don't always use names when they're communicating with each other, but do it more often when they're far apart and when adults are talking to young elephants.
Adults were also more likely to use names than their young, suggesting that name-calling may be a skill that has to be learned over time.
The researchers also played elephant calls to a small group of the animals and said that when the elephants heard recordings of their family members calling their name, they responded "energetically."
This was taken as evidence that the elephants recognized their own names.
Other animals, including parrots and dolphins, communicate with each other by copying each other's sounds. But the researchers believe their study is the first evidence of an animal species using invented names for one another.
