Wild elephants may have names that other elephants use to call them

[BacktoCricaddict]

We've always had a suspicion that elephants are extremely intelligent organisms. Intuitively, just observing their behaviors, it seemed that they are much smarter than we were giving them credit for.  But, such intuitions, suspicions or hypotheses are not knowledge until they can be proven by well-controlled experimentation and analysis that can provide strong evidence.

 

Here is a rigorous study using modern signal-processing techniques that allow us to interpret sounds that our ears and brains cannot distinguish, showing that elephants are indeed very, very communicative and have specific names for each other.  Simply fascinating!

 

https://www.npr.org/2024/06/07/nx-s1-4994426/wild-elephants-individual-names

 

Of course, when I first mentioned this to someone, their reaction was - "Mehhh ... I always knew this!! It is obvious!"  Well, not really. You always speculated it based on casual observations. You had no real weight of evidence behind your intuition. Now there is some rigorous evidence.

 

 

Quote

... elephants make these particular noises in all kinds of contexts — everything from greeting family members to comforting a calf to staying in touch with relatives over long distances.

 

So Pardo and some colleagues analyzed recordings of 469 rumbling calls that wild African elephants had made to each other in the Amboseli National Park and Samburu and Buffalo Springs National Reserves in Kenya between 1986 and 2022.

 

For every recorded call, the researchers knew the identity of the elephant making the rumble as well as, based on the context, the elephant that was being addressed.

If elephants had names, not every call would be expected to contain one — just like people don’t use each other’s names every time they speak to each other.

Still, the research team used machine learning to see if the rumbles contained identifying information — essentially, a “name” — that their computer model could learn to use to accurately predict the receiver of a call.

 

What they found is that their model was able to identify the correct elephant recipient of the call 27.5% of the time, which is much better than it performed during a control analysis that fed it random data, says Pardo.

 

This indicates, he says, that “there must be something in the calls that's allowing the model to figure out at least some of the time who that call was addressed to.”

The researchers then did some field work to see if 17 elephants — all female except for one — might recognize their own “names” and react preferentially to recordings that contained those sounds.

 

“We had to find a situation where a specific elephant was by herself, or at least not with the individual who made the recording,” he says, explaining that the team would then play the recording through a loudspeaker.

 

An elephant family relaxes under a tree in the afternoon in Samburu National Reserve, Kenya.

 

They used different recordings on different days. Depending on the day, the elephant would either hear a recorded call that was originally addressed to her or hear a call made by the same elephant that was not intended for her.

 

And, it turns out, the elephants generally seemed to know when a rumbling message was actually meant for them, suggesting that it contained something like a name. When they heard those calls, they approached the loudspeaker more quickly. They also vocalized a reply more swiftly, and made more response calls.

“The elephants responded much more strongly on average to playbacks of calls that were originally addressed to them relative to playbacks of calls from the same caller that were originally addressed to someone else,” says Pardo.

 

 

 

 

 

[Real McCoy]

2 hours ago, BacktoCricaddict said:

Of course, when I first mentioned this to someone, their reaction was - "Mehhh ... I always knew this!! It is obvious!"  Well, not really. You always speculated it based on casual observations. You had no real weight of evidence behind your intuition. Now there is some rigorous evidence.

 

And you do? based on some spotty "research" done by a college and came out on NPR. We saw your evidence based research in the covihoax vaccines

[Mariyam]

I've always imagined a domesticated transport elephant rumble to another:

 

Arre o samba, kitne aadmi they?

[BacktoCricaddict]

 

8 minutes ago, Mariyam said:

I've always imagined a domesticated transport elephant rumble to another:

 

Arre o samba, kitne aadmi they?

 

Every time I saw the name of Gujarat (Baroda?) cricketer Chintan Gaja, I would think "if elephants had names, this would be a perfect one!"

 

[Lord]

This one is a Jadeja fan too