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A new study has revealed that wild African elephants can call each other by name.

This revelation makes these majestic beasts the only nonhuman animals known to use language like this, according to the sweet study.

As babies, we learn sounds that represent people, objects, feelings, and concepts. But these words are really just arbitrary collections of sound that can start to sound meaningless when repeated too many times. The ability to create and share vocal labels, such as names, has been considered uniquely human…until now.

While some animal species, like bottlenose dolphins and parrots, can also address each other using vocal calls, these calls are used to shout out the caller’s own identity, not that of another animal. So to get a given individual’s attention, a dolphin can imitate another dolphin’s signature call, which is not exactly what humans do.

It’s like if your friend constantly says “Howzit China” whenever they see you, and so you start to get their attention by calling them “Howzit China”. But since you’re not dolphins, you’d probably just call them something like ‘Dirk’ or something.

Vox notes that this cognitive leap takes more effort than imitation alone, making it an extremely rare phenomenon in the animal kingdom.

If elephants are intelligent enough to learn each other’s names, they likely have deep social bonds, complex thoughts, and a desire to connect with others – much like humans – adding to the growing evidence that we should reconsider our relationships with animals like elephants.

“I honestly think we just scratched the surface of it,” said behavioral ecologist Mickey Pardo, a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University and lead author of this study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, which was done in collaboration with seven other researchers.

Elephants live in close-knit social groups, forming strong bonds with networks of up to 50 or more elephants centred around matriarchal herds of females and their calves. When they aren’t physically close to their friends and family, their massive vocal tracts allow them to produce loud, low-frequency rumbles that travel through the ground as seismic waves reaching elephants up to six kilometres away.

Scientists thought that if they were conversing over such distances, surely they needed to have a distinct way of directing their calls, AKA learning to call each other by their names.

To investigate this, Pardo recorded vocalisations from groups of wild adult female elephants and their calves at two field sites in Kenya, noting which elephant was calling and to whom. Besides their iconic trumpeting, elephants produce various sounds; the researchers concentrated on the rich, low-frequency rumbles used for long-distance calls, close-up greetings, and comforting their young.

The team then trained a machine-learning algorithm to match rumble calls to the elephant they were directed toward, which was able to guess the receiving elephant’s identity with 27.5% accuracy – significantly better than chance.

That number might seem relatively low, but Pardo said that they wouldn’t expect the model to be perfectly accurate. They probably aren’t saying each other’s names every time they rumble at each other and it’s possible that the machine-learning tools used in this study simply couldn’t capture all the rumbles’ nuances.

Elephant rumbles are information-dense: One 30-second recording could contain an elephant’s name, but it also might contain a lot more. Given the relatively limited amount of data Pardo’s team had access to, the machine-learning techniques could only assign a recording to the elephant name it was most similar to. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Pardo and his fellow scientists have found that vocal labelling in elephants probably doesn’t rely on imitation — but without an exhaustive understanding of elephant language, it’s hard to know for sure. With other techniques like deep learning added to the model, they could uncover more.

“If we can figure out how the elephants are encoding names in the calls,” Pardo said, “it would open up so many other avenues of inquiry.”

Now folks are wondering if this study can be used as evidence for elephant personhood. Humans have certain basic rights simply because they’re humans, and in many ways, animals are viewed as property under the law. Plus, our deeply ingrained feelings of human exceptionalism stop most of us from granting an elephant the right to personal autonomy. However, perhaps demonstrating that an animal engages in complex forms of communication isn’t necessarily enough to make people care about it.

However, the scientists are trying to make a case.

In April, The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness launched at a conference at New York University, stating that there is “strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds,” and “at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience” in all vertebrates and most invertebrates.

The declaration aims, in part, to encourage people to consider the implications of studies like Pardo’s on animal welfare policy.

In theory, findings like Pardo’s could open the door to literal human-elephant communication and help mitigate the ever-increasing conflict between elephants (who are being poached for ivory at an alarming rate) and humans.

If we can relate, empathise and understand an animal on a human level, we are more likely to protect them and treat them with respect.

[source:vox]