Elephants Are the First Non-Human Animals Now Known to Use Names, AI Research Shows

credit – Glen Carrie, Unsplash

In a study as amazing as it is probably unsurprising, a team of biologists and researchers using machine learning tools discovered that elephants call each other by names.

For an animal that is known to perform deeply social acts like grieving, raising children collectively, and communicating across miles of countryside using complex low-frequency vocalizations, the use of names seems to be natural for their societies, but being able to know an elephant’s name in ‘Elephantese’ offers the potential to dramatically reduce human-elephant conflict.

The study was conducted at Colorado State University and was organized around simple observations that the matriarch of an elephant herd the researchers were following in Kenya would use a call that brought all the elephants together around her.

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