Mickey Pardo, What’s in a Name? Elephants Address One Another with Individually Specific Calls

August 16 2024, 17:00 BST/ 12:00 ET/ 09:00 PT (5pm BST/ 12pm ET/ 9am PT)

What’s in a Name? Elephants Address One Another with Individually Specific Calls

In this presentation, we will explore how personal names are a universal feature of human language, yet few analogs exist in other species. While dolphins and parrots address conspecifics by imitating the calls of the addressee, human names are arbitrary and not imitations of the sounds typically made by the name's owner.

Mickey and his team investigated the possibility of name-like calls in wild African elephants, a highly social vocal learner for whom addressing individual conspecifics could be beneficial. By using random forest models, they found that calls were specific to individual receivers. Moreover, elephants responded differently to playbacks of calls originally addressed to them compared to calls addressed to a different individual, indicating that elephants can determine from a call's structure if it was addressed to them. Interestingly, unlike the name-like calls of other nonhuman species, elephants did not appear to imitate the calls of the receiver, suggesting that elephant names may be arbitrary in structure.

These exciting findings suggest a potential function of vocal learning in elephants and have implications for our understanding of elephant cognition and the evolution of language.

This recent discovery by Mickey and his colleagues received extensive media coverage, and Interspecies Internet is excited to bring Mickey for a more in-depth conversation on the science and implications of this breakthrough.

About the speaker

Michael Pardo is a behavioral ecologist and bioacoustician interested in the intersection of animal communication, cognition, and conservation. He earned his PhD in behavioral ecology from Cornell University, where he studied both vocal communication and social cognition in both Asian elephants and Acorn Woodpeckers. He completed a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at Colorado State University on vocal communication in African elephants, working in collaboration with Save The Elephants in Kenya. He is currently a postdoctoral associate at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, where he is using passive acoustics and AI to monitor bird populations.