Cats and dogs can learn the names we use for them, but African elephants have their own names that they call each other. According to a new study just published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, elephants use distinct calls for individual members of their families. These sound like low rumbles to us, but elephants can distinguish their own name being called. Some of their vocalizations are even below the range of human hearing.
Scientists figured this out by recording elephants at two national parks in Kenya. The elephants' vocalizations were fed into a computer to be analyzed by artificial intelligence, which learned to predict which elephant was being called with 28% accuracy. That doesn't seen high, but when scrambled data was analyzed, the elephants were identified by name with 0% accuracy. After all, we don't know elephant language that well. Read more about this intriguing line of research at MSN. -via Fark
(Image credit: Bernard Gagnon)
