Can you name a famous elephant? Babar, perhaps? Or Dumbo? Though these names may be memorable 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（隆隆的声音）," scientists say. Researchers have found that African elephants emit sounds in response to individuals in their social group, and the receivers respond accordingly.
Researchers recorded 527 elephant calls in northern Kenya and 98 calls in southern Kenya. They then distinguished which members were separated from the herd at the time of each call, or which members were close to the herd. Researchers correctly identified the receivers of 20.3% of the 625 recorded calls. This marks a step forward in understanding how these highly intelligent animals communicate.
"There's a contact rumble, an anti-predator rumble and a greeting rumble. If you look at a spectrogram（声谱图）with your eyes, they all look almost exactly the same," said Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell, an elephant biologist at Harvard Medical School. "That's why artificial intelligence（AI）has been exciting. It allows us to really figure out what the elephants are saying."
As it turned out, the calls were distinct to the receivers. Even calls from different callers to the same receiver were similar. The pattern was less obvious than it was between a single caller and his or her receiver. This may be because rumbles encode（把……编码）multiple messages at the same time, so the AI system in computer model may not have been able to pick out the "name" used in each call. "It just highlights the complexity of what's going on. And we're not skilled enough in these measurements to figure out what's going on," said Caitlin.
However, the research shows how elephants are navigating through a large landscape and can still keep in touch with specific individuals. It allows them to spread out much further and still have very close tabs on individuals, not just the group.
