Elephants in Kenya's Amboseli National Park appear to call to each other with individual names using low, complex "rumbles," a study has found.

Name a famous elephant. Babar, perhaps? Or Dumbo? Memorable though these monikers may be to humans, they sound nothing like the names elephants give each other. If you’re an elephant, your name is something more like a low, rumbling sound, scientists say.

In a new paper published Aug. 23 on the preprint server BioRxiv, researchers found that African savannah elephants (Loxodonta africana) made vocalizations specific to individuals in their social groups — and that the recipients responded accordingly. In short, elephants appear to have names for one another.

This makes them the first non-human animals to address each other in a manner that does not imitate the receiver’s own call, as dolphins and parrots do. And while other animals do produce what are known as “referential calls” in order to identify objects just as predators or food, those calls are believed to be instinctive and do not require social learning.

I am pretty certain that there was a study that claimed that parrots give each other individual names too a couple of years back.

    • Kata1yst@kbin.social
      5·
      1 year ago

      I mean, there’s intelligent, sapient, conscious, instinctive… It’s a multi-dimensional spectrum. The problem with trying to label things and put them in boxes (which we instinctively do as a species…) is that we tend to ignore evidence that doesn’t fit into a box neatly.