In a remarkable artificial intelligence experiment with elephants, researchers have successfully demonstrated how the giant mammals call each other using individual names.
According to a new to study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, African savannah elephants in Kenya were observed and listened to using machine learning software called Elephant Voices, which analyzed calls made between two herds of elephants.
The research took place in the Samburu National Reserve and Amboseli National Park for four years, including 14 months of fieldwork, in which elephants were tracked and observed and their “calls” recorded. Some 469 unique calls or “snores” were captured from African elephants in the experiment.
What does the study reveal about the way elephants communicate?
It has long been known that elephants are highly social animals.
“The elephant social network is incredibly rich, incredibly nuanced and incredibly complex with this hierarchical structure of different types of relationships, preferences and interactions,” said George Wittemyer, a behavioral ecologist at Colorado State University, one of the institutes involved in the Kenya study. , he told Al Jazeera.
Initial observations by researchers conducting the study in Kenya appeared to show that elephants used a call-and-response communication system. It was noticed that the matriarchs, the female leaders of the elephant herds, made a call, which sounded like a bang, from within the group of elephants and the entire herd responded.
However, shortly afterwards the same matriarch gave another similar bang and only one elephant far from the group gave a response as it hurriedly returned to the group.
“And so in those cases, it’s so obvious to the observer, to us on the ground, that something happened that everyone in the group knew about,” Wittemyer said. “The call was directed to this other individual. This individual also received and realized this, responded and came to the group. And then you’re wondering, ‘Are they using names?’”
Observations have suggested that there may be a unique identifier embedded in elephant rumbles that each elephant can recognize. These unique sounds are believed to be similar to how humans identify themselves.
Wittemyer noted, “Maybe we greet each other with our names, but it’s not like we’re constantly using names with each other, once we get each other’s attention, once we’re immersed in the conversation. And it appears that this is probably the case for elephants as well.”
How were elephant sounds recorded?
Although humans are familiar with the loud trumpet sounds that elephants make, some elephant sounds are infrasonic, meaning they use a frequency that is too low to be heard by humans. Therefore, specialized equipment was used to record and analyze the booms. “They use vocal cords and produce these sounds, but the structure of these sounds is very different from ours,” Wittemyer explained.
Specialized AI learning software was used to identify specific and unique names used in reference to specific elephants, occurring within the stampedes. Using this software, researchers were able to determine which names were being used in elephant fights in nearly a third (27.5 percent) of the “calls.”
Identifying and understanding other parts of the riots would require additional research.
During the test, researchers played a sound from a speaker that they believed to be an elephant’s “name,” and the elephant responded by raising its head, flapping its ears, while snoring backwards as it walked toward the speaker. .
In other cases, when the speaker’s call was not his “name,” the researchers found, the elephant could raise its head, but the response was less active in a behavioral sense.
Do other animals use similar call signs?
Not exactly. While dolphins and parrots imitate the sounds of other members of their species to address each other, elephants are the first known non-human animals to use unique names without relying on imitation.
In a separate report published last month in the journal Nature Communications, researchers analyzed thousands of recorded calls made by sperm whales, revealing a “phonetic alphabet” within their sequences of “click” sounds. This discovery indicates that sperm whales use much more complex communication systems, known as “codas,” than previously believed.
Unlike humpback whales, which “sing,” sperm whales emit clicking sounds, using a process known as echolocation, in which sound waves bounce off distant objects, returning to the whale so it can determine where the object is. Whales use echolocation to hunt and navigate the ocean depths.
This story originally appeared on Aljazeera.com read the full story
