Do Elephants Have Names? Vocal Labeling of Individual Conspecifics in African Elephants + ...
13Michael Pardo (Colorado State)
https://simons.berkeley.edu/talks/michael-pardo-colorado-state-2023-06-13
Decoding Communication in Nonhuman Species II
Personal names are a universal feature of human language, yet few analogs exist in other species.
While dolphins and parrots address conspecifics by imitating the calls of the addressee, human
names are arbitrary, i.e., not imitations of the sounds typically made by the name’s owner. We
investigated the possibility of name-like calls in wild African elephants, a highly social vocal
learner in which addressing individual conspecifics could be beneficial. Using random forest
models, we found that calls were specific to individual receivers, even when acoustically
divergent from the receiver’s own calls. Elephants differentially responded to playbacks of calls
originally addressed to them relative to calls addressed to a different individual, indicating that
elephants can determine from a call’s structure if it was addressed to them. Our findings offer the
first evidence for arbitrary naming of conspecifics in nonhuman animals.