Elephants possess a diverse communication repertoire, encompassing everything from resonant trumpeting and deep, reverberating rumbles to menacing growls, soothing purrs and plaintive squeals. During your last visit to the Kruger National Park, did you ever wonder whether each of these might be directed towards specific members of the elephants’ closely knit groups, akin to humans calling one another by name?

The varying vocalisations have long intrigued scientists. Thanks to analyses of thousands of hours of recordings by researchers from Colorado State University in the US and Kenya’s Amboseli Elephant Research Project, new insights have emerged. We now know that a mother elephant’s vocal call does not occur if her calf is within sight or is less than 50 m away. Additionally, murmuring is elephants’ way of greeting herd members upon meeting, a behaviour that ceases upon physical contact.

Seeking proof that elephants indeed call each other by name, as it were, a US National Science Foundation graduate student at the University of Colorado and his colleagues designed an AI-based system capable of comparing, analysing and breaking down calls made by about 100 African elephants into their basic acoustic properties.

The audio recordings were those of female-calf groups in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park from 1986 to 1990 as well as from 1997 to 2006, and of elephant herds in the Samburu and Buffalo Springs national reserves, also in Kenya, from November 2019 to March 2020 and from June 2021 to April 2022 respectively.

These elephant populations had been continuously monitored for decades and could be individually identified by the size and shape of their ears.

Detailing the findings in an article published in the scientific journal Nature, Ecology and Evolution last month, the researchers say they were able to identify the intended receiver in about 27.5% of the calls made by elephants. Quite a low rate, but the researchers are adamant this does not indicate that elephants don’t direct specific calls towards specific members of their herds. Their argument is that elephants cannot be expected to use ‘names’ in every call they make. Valid argument. Family members or colleagues at work do not always call you by name when they want to draw your attention, or do they?

The researchers played back the recorded vocalisations in the vicinity of the elephants they believed were the intended recipients of the calls as well as other elephants, with the latter serving as a control group.

Interestingly, the elephants for which a call was not intended carried on with their activities, as if nothing had happened. However, almost without fail, elephants identified by the AI-based system to be the intended recipients of the call reacted by raising their heads and ended up heading in the direction of the speaker.

To further confirm that elephants call other members of their herd by name, the researchers used the AI-based system to group all the calls made by different animals to the same recipient. They found that while the calls were not identical – much like how a woman with a high-pitched voice and a man with a deep voice, for example, would pronounce Ramaphosa differently – the acoustic properties of calls directed at the same elephant showed more similarities to one another than to calls meant for other elephants.

I find this study fascinating. For us as humans, names are arbitrary labels unrelated to our inherent qualities, requiring us to learn and remember one another’s identities. Interestingly, elephants seem to exhibit similar cognitive abilities, suggesting a capacity akin to our own.

The study’s authors seem to agree, saying: “The ability to connect an arbitrary sound to an individual elephant and for other members of a group to apparently recognise that arbitrary label suggests the ability to think abstractly and possibly symbolically.”

Nature does not cease to amaze.

So, the next time you are at the Kruger National Park and you hear an elephant squeal, it might not be just a call, but a coded message, a caution by a mother warning her calf of the presence of potential menace in the form of a human being.