A new collaborative study has shown that African savanna elephants address one another by name, rather like we do. During the fieldwork, the Amboseli Trust for Elephants team recorded vocalisations from individually known wild African elephants from two different populations in Kenya. Elephant Voices recorded in Amboseli National Park, where the Amboseli Trust for Elephants has studied elephants for five decades, and the Colorado State University team recorded in the Samburu National Reserve, where Save the Elephants has its main research base. The ultimate dataset comprised 469 distinct calls from which 101 unique callers and 117 unique receivers were identified.

Using machine learning they uncovered that elephants address each other with unique calls, termed ‘vocal labels.’ The study offers unprecedented insights into animal cognition and the evolution of language and was published in Nature Ecology & Evolution earlier this month.