Elephants are the first non-human animals found to use individual names for each other, a new study published in Nature has found. Dolphins and parrots have also been observed addressing each other, but the study noted that those creatures rely on imitations of the addressee’s sounds – not invented names, as humans and seemingly elephants do.
To reach this conclusion, researchers used a combination of machine learning and playback experiments to analyse calls from wild African elephants in Kenya. They found that elephants addressed by their own name responded far more positively and energetically than those that weren’t.
The research “not only shows that elephants use specific vocalisations for each individual, but that they recognise and react to a call addressed to them while ignoring those addressed to others,” the study’s lead author Michael Pardo, behavioural ecologist at Colorado State University in the US, told media.
[See more: Growing elephant numbers create challenges for Mozambican national park]
George Wittemyer, another researcher involved in the study, said its findings indicated that the pachyderms “have the ability for abstract thought.”
The researchers found that elephants appeared to use names most frequently when communicating across long distances and when adults were addressing youngsters. However, they were not able to isolate the sounds that were specifically used to identify individual elephants and could not work out whether the same sounds were used by different pachyderms to refer to the same individual.
Pardo and Wittemyer said their next step was looking into how names were encoded in elephant calls. They also wanted to “explore the possibility that elephants vocally label or name other entities in their environment.”
