Animals communicate in many ways, but few species call each other by individual names.
New research has revealed that African elephants are among this select group, joining dolphins and parrots in using unique identifiers for each other.
Click and listen the full chat below:
On today’s The Briefing, the lead author of the study and behavioural ecologist Mickey Pardo joins Bension Siebert to explain how African elephants use rumble sounds to communicate.
A study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution found that African elephants use low rumble sounds to address specific individuals.
The research team discovered that elephants in Kenya call each other by unique sounds that function like names.
Scientists demonstrated that the acoustic structure of these calls could predict the intended receiver, regardless of the similarity to the receiver’s usual vocalisations.
“It’s a pretty rare ability as far as we know. There’s only a few other species where evidence for names or name like calls has been found,” he said.
“It shows that the ability to use names is not exclusive to humans and points to a complex communication system in elephants.”
The study’s implications extend to the understanding of language evolution, suggesting that naming and complex communication might be more common in the animal kingdom than previously thought.
“So a lot of people will say categorically humans are the only species with language. I think that’s a little bit too strong because there’s just so many species that we barely studied at all.”