Elephants identify each other with their own name within the herd.

‘The elephants they can remember’ –read one of the titles of the British writer Agatha Christie – and now we know that they also give each other names and respond to them when called by other members of the pack.

This has been demonstrated by research carried out for four years in two elephant nature reserves in Kenya, Samburu and the Amboseli National Park, and published this Monday in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.

The study included 14 months of intensive field work following the elephants in a vehicle and recording up to 470 different calls from 101 individuals, targeting 117 unique recipients.

When the researchers played the recorded calls to the same group of elephants, each specimen reacted to hearing its ‘name’, either approaching the interlocutor or returning the call.

Each elephant responded when hearing its own name from another specimen in the herd, but not when hearing that of the others, which demonstrated recognition of the vocal sounds associated with its name.

The scientists also saw that elephants, like people, do not always call each other by name in the ‘conversations’, But vocalizing the name was more frequent when they were at a certain distance or when the adult specimens were talking to the offspring.

Learning capacity

The ability of elephants to learn to produce new sounds and identify each specimen with unique sounds is “unusual in non-human animals”, the authors remember.

Dolphins and parrots call each other by their ‘name’ but they do so through a mechanism of imitating the call sound of the recipient of that ‘name’.

“Our study indicates that elephants do not rely on imitation of recipient calls to address each other, but instead produce unique sounds to refer to each individual, just as when humans call each other,” says one of the authors, Michael Pardo, a researcher at Colorado State University and the NGO Save the Elephants, in Kenya.

This ability for arbitrary communication, in which a sound represents an idea but does not imitate it, is considered a high-level cognitive ability and opens up the possibility for elephants to engage in abstract thinking.

The path to the name

Elephants and humans evolved tens of millions of years ago, but both species share social complexity and communication skills at different levels.

Elephants also relate to each other through family units, social groups, and a clan structure similar to the complex social environments in which humans operate.

The development of complex social interactions was, according to the researchers, what could drive the development of arbitrary vocal labeling of other individuals.

What do they communicate?

In addition to being called by their ‘Names’elephants are very communicative: successive research has shown how their calls transmit all types of information, such as the identity, age, sex, emotional state and behavioral context of the interlocutor.

With their calls they even coordinate entire movements of a herd over great distances.

Their vocalizations—from trumpets to the low rumblings of their vocal cords—span a wide spectrum of frequencies, including infrasonic sounds below the audible range of human hearing.

Sight, smell and touch are other tools they use to communicate. The next steps of the research will be to investigate whether elephants name other things they interact with, such as food, water and places.

The new insights into elephant cognition and communication revealed by the study strengthen the case for their conservation, researchers say, as elephant populations are threatened with extinction due to poaching for their ivory tusks. and the loss of habitat.

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