A recent study done by Colorado State University has shown that elephants may be the first non-human animals to call each other by name.

I’ve linked the paper in the comments

  • Timecircleline@sh.itjust.works
    21·
    1 year ago

    I’m not at all surprised. One of my cats has different calls for me, my partner, and my other cat. She’s smart for a cat but I think she’d be dumb for an elephant. I’m rambling now.

    • Haggunenons@lemmy.worldOPM
      4·
      1 year 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.

      • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        1 year 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.

        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…

        • Haggunenons@lemmy.worldOPM
          2·
          1 year ago

          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.

        • Haggunenons@lemmy.worldOPM
          2·
          1 year ago

          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.

    • Haggunenons@lemmy.worldOPM
      3·
      1 year ago

      You’re so welcome! This is by far the most popular post in this community so far, it’s so cool to see so many people here. Thank you very much for your kind comment!

      • livus@kbin.social
        3·
        1 year ago

        Yes, it blew up! I knew nothing about this subject but saw it on all and have become a subscriber.

        Can’t find it right now but I remember reading about a strange case where a young bull elephant was shot by poachers and walked many miles to get help from the elephant orphanage. The thing that’s interesting is he had never been in the orphanage himself, but he had been hanging out with elephants who had.

        I wouldn’t be surprised if elephants have an entire language.

        • Haggunenons@lemmy.worldOPM
          1·
          1 year ago

          That’s awesome! Welcome! I’m also quite new to the subject, I just noticed in this recent AI explosion that animal communication decoding was coming up quite a bit and thought it would be a neat idea for a community.

          I vaguely remember hearing that story of the wounded elephant as well, but didn’t realize that they had never been to the hospital before, that’s amazing! I would love to see more about that.

          I have heard some of elephants language being decoded, for instance they seem to have a sound that means bee, and in fact there is even a website that claims to be an english/elephant translator, but I suspect that it must be quite limited.

          • livus@kbin.social
            2·
            1 year ago

            That’s all really neat!

            I was skeptical about the translator but the fine print says it’s run by the David Sheldrake Trust which is the same group that runs the elephant orphanage. It’s definitely a cool awareness tool anyway.

            • Haggunenons@lemmy.worldOPM
              2·
              1 year ago

              Nice, that certainly does lend it some credence. They must have so much data to use in making it. Great to know!