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It is known that some animals use particular vocalizations when calling to known other members of their species, among them dolphins and some parrots. Now, elephants can be included on that list. Elephant calls to their companions are very low-pitched rumbles, with some tones below the range of human hearing. Scientists followed elephants on the Kenyan savanna, recording their calls, and noting which other elephant the call was directed toward. While they expected the rumbles contained the names of other individual elephants, there was no way to be sure without some kind of analysis, particularly since human hearing could not perceive the full sound of the calls.
We fed the model a series of numbers describing the sound properties of each call and told it which elephant each call was addressed to. 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. We used a total of 437 calls from 99 individual callers to train the model.
Part of the reason we needed to use machine learning for this analysis is because rumbles convey multiple messages at once, including the identity, age and sex of the caller, emotional state and behavioral context. Names are likely only one small component within these calls. A computer algorithm is often better than the human ear at detecting such complex and subtle patterns.
We didn’t expect elephants to use names in every call, but we had no way of knowing ahead of time which calls might contain a name. So, we included all the rumbles where we thought they might use names at least some of the time in this analysis.
The model successfully identified the recipient for 27.5% of these calls – significantly better than what it would have achieved by randomly guessing. This result indicated that some rumbles contained information that allowed the model to identify the intended recipient of the call.
While this result still didn’t definitively prove that the calls contained the names of individual other elephants, but it was noted that the calls one elephant made toward a particular other elephant were more similar than those the first elephant made directed toward other elephants. So in another experiment, the scientists played back recorded calls made to individual elephants to observe their response.
One interesting aspect of elephant calls to other elephants is that, while dolphins and parrots address another individual by imitating the specific call sounds of that individual, there was no similarity between an individual elephant’s calls and the calls used by other elephants to communicate with that elephant. Unlike dolphins and parrots, elephants do not use imitation of sounds for the names of other individuals. Instead, like humans, they are assigning names with arbitrary vocalizations.
While it seems clear that elephants use names when addressing other elephants, it’s still not clear what parts of the rumbles are the actual names, as opposed to other information in the vocalization. Further study is aimed at achieving this goal.
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