Do elephants really call to each other by name?

Research conducted in Kenya has revealed that elephants use individual names.

In a remarkable experiment of artificial intelligence meets elephants, researchers have successfully demonstrated how the giant mammals call to each other using individual names.

According to a new study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, African savannah elephants in Kenya were observed and listened to, using machine learning software called Elephant Voices which analysed calls being made between two herds of elephants.

The research took place in Samburu National Reserve and Amboseli National Park over four years including 14 months of fieldwork, in which elephants were tracked and observed and their “calls” recorded. Some 469 unique calls or “rumbles” were captured from the African elephants in the experiment.

It has long been known that elephants are highly social animals.

“The social network of elephants is incredibly rich, incredibly nuanced, and incredibly complex with this hierarchical structure of different types of relations and preferences and interactions,” George Wittemyer, behavioural ecologist at Colorado State University, one of the institutes involved in the Kenya study, told Al Jazeera.