Male elephants call out to the herd to get moving

That characteristic “let’s go” used by humans to indicate to others that they have to move has its equivalent in the elephants males, who produce a specific roar to call the herd to move, according to a study by the American University of Stanford.

This ability was thought to be exclusive to females, but observations and sound analysis carried out over almost 20 years with a herd of elephants in Etosha National Park (Namibia) have revealed that males also have a specific sound to indicate to the rest that they must move.

The study’s findings were published Monday in the journal PeerJ.

“We were very surprised to find that male elephants, who generally have loose social ties, engage in such sophisticated vocal coordination to call the group, indicating that their communication is more complex than previously thought,” says Stanford biologist Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell, lead author of the study.

O’Connell-Rodwell has found that calls to move are made by the most socially integrated males, often the most dominant in close-knit packs.

The researcher first recorded these male calls in 2004, while conducting nighttime fieldwork to understand how elephant vocalizations spread across the ground.

Since then and until 2017, she and other researchers have been collecting elephant sounds around Mushara Waterhole in the national park using high-tech recording equipment, including buried microphones and night-vision video cameras.

These devices capture infrasonic vocalizations, inaudible to the human ear, and allow high-resolution images of the behavior of male elephants to be seen.

The researchers analyzed the vocalizations for acoustic patterns, and analysed the images to understand the relationships and hierarchy among the males, looking at which elephants initiated the calls, how others responded and what happened next.

A learned ritual

The calls made by male elephants are very similar to those previously recorded in females, which, according to the researchers, would indicate that they learn the behaviour from females when they are young.

“They grew up in a family where all the female leaders participated in this ritual, so we think that as they mature and form their own groups, they repeat the behavior observed in females to coordinate movements with other males,” adds O’Connell-Rodwell in a statement from Stanford University.

In both male and female elephants, the initiator’s call is followed by a call from the next individual, and each elephant waits until the preceding call is almost finished before adding its own voice, leading to “a harmonious pattern of turns.”

Another study carried out with elephants in Kenya, published just over a month ago, revealed that elephants identify each other with a personal name within the herd, which, together with the present research, shows that communication between elephants is more complex than previously thought.