African elephants address one another with name-like calls − similar to humans
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星期三, 六月 12, 2024
People use unique names to address each other, but we’re one of only a handful of animal species known to do that, including bottlenose dolphins.
Key Points:
- People use unique names to address each other, but we’re one of only a handful of animal species known to do that, including bottlenose dolphins.
- The elephants in question live fully in the wild and are, of course, unaware of the epithets we apply to them.
Finding evidence for name-like calls
- But really, most elephant calls are deep, thrumming sounds known as rumbles that are partially below the range of human hearing.
- We thought that if elephants have names, they most likely say them in rumbles, so we focused on these calls in our analysis.
- Based on this information, the model tried to learn patterns in the calls associated with the identity of the recipient.
- Then, we asked the model to predict the recipient for a separate sample of calls.
- In our next analysis, we found that calls from the same caller to the same recipient were significantly more similar, on average, than calls from the same caller to different recipients.
Names without imitation
- This system of naming via imitation is a little different from the way names and other words typically work in human language.
- While we do occasionally name things by imitating the sounds that they make, such as “cuckoo” and “zipper,” most of our words are arbitrary.
- This finding suggested that like humans, but unlike other animals, elephants may address one another without just imitating the addressee’s calls.