Yeah, it is really surprising that something like this would be a new discovery, seems like if it’s happening then scientists would have known for a long time. I would love to see mention of it from longer ago. It would be wild if it is a new development in elephant “culture” and they somehow picked it up from observing people or something, seems very unlikely though.
Dolphins have been known to have signiture whistles, but I think that may just be them identifying themselves uniquely and not used to get the attention of a specific other dolphin.
Yeah, it is really surprising that something like this would be a new discovery, seems like if it’s happening then scientists would have known for a long time.
It doesn’t surprise me at all that such a discovery would happen right about now. It’s probably a lot easier to dump a bunch of recordings of elephant noises into a statistical model and see what falls out than it would’ve been to actually recognize the unique sounds by ear without the help of computers.
Edit: I was here from browsing ‘all,’ and I just noticed what community this is. Y’all probably understand what I wrote better than I do…
Yeah, you are spot on, what you described is exactly what has been happening. There has been an explosion of both recordings being taken and ai being used to analyze them. I just would have kind of thought that with zoos or other elephants that were closely monitored someone may have noticed that they were doing this awhile ago. Ya know what though, elephants make noises that are outside of the human hearing range and the ability to analyze these sounds is also new, so that is probably another reason that this is just now being uncovered.
And also, welcome from All! It’s so cool to see a post here get enough traction to get some people from there. I think this field has so much potential and it should be really interesting to see how it develops in the coming years.
I’m sure I read this 30 plus years ago
Yeah, it is really surprising that something like this would be a new discovery, seems like if it’s happening then scientists would have known for a long time. I would love to see mention of it from longer ago. It would be wild if it is a new development in elephant “culture” and they somehow picked it up from observing people or something, seems very unlikely though.
Dolphins have been known to have signiture whistles, but I think that may just be them identifying themselves uniquely and not used to get the attention of a specific other dolphin.
It doesn’t surprise me at all that such a discovery would happen right about now. It’s probably a lot easier to dump a bunch of recordings of elephant noises into a statistical model and see what falls out than it would’ve been to actually recognize the unique sounds by ear without the help of computers.
Edit: I was here from browsing ‘all,’ and I just noticed what community this is. Y’all probably understand what I wrote better than I do…
Yeah, you are spot on, what you described is exactly what has been happening. There has been an explosion of both recordings being taken and ai being used to analyze them. I just would have kind of thought that with zoos or other elephants that were closely monitored someone may have noticed that they were doing this awhile ago. Ya know what though, elephants make noises that are outside of the human hearing range and the ability to analyze these sounds is also new, so that is probably another reason that this is just now being uncovered.
And also, welcome from All! It’s so cool to see a post here get enough traction to get some people from there. I think this field has so much potential and it should be really interesting to see how it develops in the coming years.