Elephants have long been recognized as highly social animals. Now, a unique social experiment has proven it. Recently, researchers, using AI tools, found that elephants call each other by their names. Their study, which was published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, revealed that African Savannah elephants used some 469 unique calls or “rumbles” to call each other.
The research took place in Samburu National Reserve and Amboseli National Park over four years. All the elephants were tracked and listened to using machine-learning software called ‘Elephant Voices.’
Initial observations from researchers showed that elephants were using a call-and-response system of communication. It had been noticed that matriarchs, the female leaders of elephant herds, would make a call, which sounded like a rumble, from within the group of elephants, and the entire herd would respond.
However, shortly afterwards, the same matriarch would give another, similar rumble, and only one elephant far off from the group would give a response while hurriedly coming back to the group.
How social are elephants?
“The social network of elephants is incredibly rich, incredibly nuanced, and incredibly complex with this hierarchical structure of different types of relations and preferences and interactions,” George Wittemyer, a behavioural ecologist at Colorado State University, one of the institutes involved in the Kenya study, told Al Jazeera.