African Elephants Address One Another With Individually Specific Name-Like Calls (nature.com) 31
Abstract of a paper published on Nature: Personal names are a universal feature of human language, yet few analogues exist in other species. While dolphins and parrots address conspecifics by imitating the calls of the addressee, human names are not imitations of the sounds typically made by the named individual. Labelling objects or individuals without relying on imitation of the sounds made by the referent radically expands the expressive power of language. Thus, if non-imitative name analogues were found in other species, this could have important implications for our understanding of language evolution. Here we present evidence that wild African elephants address one another with individually specific calls, probably without relying on imitation of the receiver. We used machine learning to demonstrate that the receiver of a call could be predicted from the call's acoustic structure, regardless of how similar the call was to the receiver's vocalizations. Moreover, elephants differentially responded to playbacks of calls originally addressed to them relative to calls addressed to a different individual. Our findings offer evidence for individual addressing of conspecifics in elephants. They further suggest that, unlike other non-human animals, elephants probably do not rely on imitation of the receiver's calls to address one another.
African or European elephants? (Score:2, Funny)
Eom.
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This makes me sad.
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:-)
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There were mammoths in North America only 4,000 years ago, though.
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Wiki : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Oh, they've pushed the most-recent Mammoth up to "2000 BCE" in the last few years. I sit corrected.
Norm! (Score:2)
Kids today: All Bellas and no Belas! (Score:4, Funny)
Meanwhile, at an elephant elementary school, a teacher is coping as best she can with five students out of thirty being named after the same character from an elephant movie that was popular eight years ago.
"Gruntblat! Stop that immediately! No, not you, Gruntblat S., I was talking to Gruntblat P.!"
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My sister was born the year that the song 'Shari Baby' was popular, she had three Sharis in her grade school class. The teachers ended up saying "Miss Bixby..." or "Miss Johnson" most of the time.
It's time to address the elephant in the room (Score:5, Funny)
with non-imitative individually specific calls.
But ... (Score:2)
Labelling objects or individuals without relying on imitation of the sounds made by the referent radically expands the expressive power of language.
Your mom (Score:2)
Yes, but they're imitating your mom, not you. Unless you changed your name. But I think the imitation they were talking about was what we would call a voice impression.
Does each elephant have just one name? (Score:3, Interesting)
Do elephants A and B both call elephant C "Eep Opp" or does elephant A say "Eep Opp" while elephant B says "Ork Ah-ah?"
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https://poets.org/poem/naming-... [poets.org]
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Do elephants A and B both call elephant C "Eep Opp" or does elephant A say "Eep Opp" while elephant B says "Ork Ah-ah?"
I love you, and this comment.
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Re:That's answered in the paper. (Score:4)
Thanks for that link. The full text was behind a paywall in the original story link. It goes on to say
Further work to identify how vocal labels are encoded in elephant calls will be necessary to definitively determine if different callers use the same label for the same receiver.
So the jury is still out, but there's at least a chance that Eep Opp is Eep Opp is Eep Opp.
They're name-calling alright (Score:2)
"Hey, dumbass!"
"What do you want, fartbreath?"
"Nothing, just checking. Go back to whatever shit you were doing with asswipe over there."
How do they call Indian elephants? (Score:2)
Brad and Stephen?
This discovery... (Score:2)
Sperm whales, and budgies ... (Score:4)
Sperm whales have identity codas [oregonstate.edu] (more [phys.org]) that denote which 'clan' they belong to.
I've read somewhere that an individual whale will introduce his/her self as "I am Bob, from clan A, in region B [e.g. Caribbean]. I can't find a reference to that though.
Similarly, a while ago, I saw someone claiming that a budgie female will have different chirps for each chick in the nest. Again, no reference.
Anyone who can add info on these, please do ...
Re:Sperm whales, and budgies ... (Score:4, Interesting)
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"corvids" is less misleading. Around here (well, in the part of the nation I grew up in, though not the country I live in) there is an "identifiction" couplet that "a crow in a crowd is a rook, and a rook on it's own is a crow", reflecting that the physically very similar (to us ; I wonder how far into the UV the relevant birds eyes go) birds seem to have very different social lives.
On which subject, I've got to magpie-proof
My cat has unique names for everyone (Score:1)
My cat has unique names for everyone it calls me Brook - meow, my son who has a 2 syllable name meow meow, my daughter meow, meow, meow and my wife hsss.