In a remarkable experiment where artificial intelligence meets elephants, researchers have successfully demonstrated how the giant mammals call each other by individual names.
According to a new study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, African savanna elephants were observed and listened to in Kenya using machine learning software called Elephant Voices that analyzed calls made between two elephant herds.
The research was carried out in Samburu National Reserve and Amboseli National Park over four years, including 14 months of fieldwork, in which elephants were tracked and observed and their “calls” recorded. Some 469 unique calls or “rumbles” from African elephants were captured in the experiment.
What does the study reveal about the way elephants communicate?
It has long been known that elephants are very social animals.
“The elephant social network is incredibly rich, incredibly nuanced and incredibly complex with this hierarchical structure of different types of relationships, preferences and interactions,” said George Wittemyer, a behavioral ecologist at Colorado State University, one of the institutes involved in the Kenya study. , he told Al Jazeera.
Initial observations by researchers conducting the study in Kenya appeared to show that elephants used a call-and-response communication system. It had been observed that the matriarchs, the female leaders of the elephant herds, would make a call, which sounded like a roar, from within the group of elephants and the entire herd would respond.
However, shortly after the same matriarch would make another similar noise and only an elephant far from the group would respond as it hurriedly returned to the group.
“And then in those cases, it's so obvious to the observer, to us on the ground, that something happened there that everyone in the group knew,” Wittemyer said. “The call was directed to this other individual. That individual received and perceived that too, he responded and came to the group. And then you wonder, 'Are they using names?'”
The observations suggested that there could be a unique identifier embedded in elephant noises that each elephant can recognize. These unique sounds are believed to be similar to the way humans identify each other.
Wittemyer noted: “Maybe we greet each other with our names, but it's not like we're constantly using names once we have each other's attention, once we're immersed in the conversation. And it seems like that's probably the case for elephants, too.”
How were elephant sounds recorded?
While humans are familiar with the loud trumpeting sound that elephants make, some elephant sounds are infrasonic, meaning they use a frequency that is too low to be heard by humans. Therefore, specialized equipment was used to record and analyze the noises. “They use vocal cords and make these sounds, but the structure of those sounds is very different from ours,” Wittemyer explained.
Specialized AI learning software was used to identify specific, unique names used in reference to particular elephants and occurring within the noises. Using this software, researchers were able to determine that names were used in elephant fights in almost a third (27.5 percent) of the “calls.”
Identifying and understanding other parts of the rumors would require additional research.
During testing, researchers played a sound from a speaker that they believed was the “name” of an elephant, and the elephant responded by raising its head, flapping its ears, and rumbling backwards as it walked toward the speaker.
In other cases, when the speaker's call was not its “name,” the researchers found, the elephant could raise its head, but the response was less active in a behavioral sense.
Do other animals use similar call signals?
Not quite. While dolphins and parrots imitate the sounds of other members of their species to address others, elephants are the first non-human animals known to use unique names without relying on imitation.
In another report published last month by the journal Nature Communications, researchers analyzed thousands of recorded calls made by sperm whales, revealing a “phonetic alphabet” within their sequences of “click” sounds. This discovery indicates that sperm whales use much more complex communication systems, known as “codas,” than previously believed.
Unlike humpback whales that “sing,” sperm whales make clicking sounds, using a process known as echolocation whereby sound waves bounce off objects in the distance and return to the whale so it can determine where the object is. Whales use echolocation to hunt and navigate in the deep ocean.
