Do Elephants Have Names? Vocal Labeling of Individual Conspecifics in African Elephants

Explore groundbreaking research on vocal communication in African elephants in this 57-minute lecture from the Simons Institute. Delve into the fascinating possibility of name-like calls among wild elephants, a highly social species capable of vocal learning. Discover how random forest models revealed calls specific to individual receivers, distinct from the receiver's own vocalizations. Learn about playback experiments demonstrating elephants' ability to recognize calls addressed to them. Gain insights into the first evidence of arbitrary naming of conspecifics in non-human animals, drawing parallels and distinctions with human language and other species' communication systems. Understand the implications of this research for our understanding of animal cognition and the evolution of complex communication.