This adult elephant in Kenya has been named “Desert Rose” by researchers, but does she have her own elephant name?
George Witmeyer
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George Witmeier
Wild elephants appear to address each other with distinctive rumbles that may resemble individual names.
That’s according to a controversial new study in the journal natural ecology and evolutionwhich was inspired by early research showing bottlenose dolphins have a signature whistle.
“Sometimes, another bottlenose dolphin will imitate the other person’s signature whistle to get their attention, effectively calling their name,” said Cornell University biologist Mickey Pardo.
He wondered whether elephants, known for imitating sounds, would do something similar.
“The idea from the beginning of this project was to try to figure out if the statues had names,” Pardo said.
He was referring to the names the animals give themselves, rather than the names given to them by researchers working in nature reserves, such as Margaret and Mary.
Elephants are well known for their trumpeting, but Pardo said the trumpeting was a sudden noise that was more like screaming or laughing. He believes that if the elephants had names, they would be somehow encoded in the elephants’ constant low-frequency rumble.
“The rumble itself is highly variable in structure,” said Pardo, who conducted the research while working at Colorado State University. “There’s a lot of variation in their acoustic structure.”
Elephants make these special sounds in a variety of situations—from greeting family members, to comforting baby elephants, to staying in touch with distant relatives.
So Pardo and some colleagues analyzed 469 recordings of rumbling calls wild African elephants made to each other between 1986 and 2022 in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park and Samburu and Buffalo Springs National Reserves.
For each recorded call, the researchers knew the identity of the elephant making the rumble and, based on context, the identity of the elephant making the call.
If the statues had names, not every call would include a name—just as people wouldn’t use each other’s names every time they talk to each other.
Still, the research team used machine learning to see if the rumble contained identifying information (essentially, a “name”), which their computer model could learn to use to accurately predict the recipient of the call.
Pardo said they found that their model was able to identify the correct elephant recipient 27.5 percent of the time, which was much better than it performed during a control analysis in which it was fed random data.
This suggests, he said, “there must be something in the call that allows the model to figure out who the call is for, at least some of the time.”
The researchers then conducted some fieldwork to see if 17 elephants (all but one female) would recognize their own “names” and respond preferentially to recordings containing those sounds.
“We had to find a situation where that particular elephant was alone, or at least not with the person who made the recording,” he said, explaining that the team would then play the recording through a loudspeaker.
In the afternoon, a family of elephants rested under a tree in Kenya’s Samburu National Reserve.
George Witmeier
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George Witmeier
They use different recordings on different days. Depending on the day, the elephant would either hear a recording of the original call to her, or the same elephant would hear a call that was not intended for her.
It turns out that elephants often seem to know when a rumbling message is actually meant for them, suggesting it contains something like a name. When they heard these calls, they moved closer to the speaker faster. They also responded faster and made more response calls.
“Elephants, on average, responded much more strongly to the playback of a call originally made to them than to the playback of a call originally made to someone else from the same caller,” Pardo said.
The results of these playback experiments look “very convincing,” said biologist Carl Berg of the University of Texas at Rio Grande Valley.
“I have no doubt they are using these unique labels to address these issues,” Berg said. “Now, are they nicknames? Are they names? Where do they come from?
Berger was not a member of the research team, but he studied how wild parrot chicks acquire a unique characteristic call (aka name) by slightly modifying the characteristic call of their caregivers.
He noted that in the elephant study, the rumbles containing identification messages appeared to be typically made by mothers speaking to their calves.
“A lot of it is between moms and their calves,” Berg said. “It looks like they may have gotten it from their mom.”
Until now, however, no one has been able to figure out exactly which acoustic features in an elephant’s low-frequency rumble might amount to a name.
“I would really like to be able to isolate the names of specific individual elephants, because if we can do that, we can answer a lot of other questions that we can’t quite figure out,” Pardo said in the study.
For example, it is unclear whether the elephants all use the same “name” when addressing the same recipient. The researchers also didn’t know whether the elephants spoke to each other in the third person. “Do they use other people’s names when they’re not present?” Pardo wondered.
Berg noted that animals that use sounds with similar names—humans, dolphins, parrots, and now elephants—are intelligent, long-lived social animals that live in stable groups.
But that doesn’t mean that all of these creatures use names in exactly the same way.
“People might think that elephant names are exactly the same as human names, but that’s not necessarily true,” Pardo said.
After all, he points out, humans and elephants have evolved over tens of millions of years. “That’s quite a long time.”
