In 2024, African elephants in Kenya were found using name-like calls for one another; a model identified the intended recipient 27.5% of the time at Samburu and Amboseli

Elephants might know something about each other that we never guessed: their names. According to a study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution on June 10, 2024, wild African elephants in Kenya have specific, made-up calls to address one another, just like humans use names. The study titled ‘African elephants address one another with individually specific name-like calls’ showed that a computer model trained on hundreds of these calls could identify the intended recipient of a call about 27.5% of the time, based only on the audio. That may sound low, but the researchers say it is far better than chance and suggests something personal is going on inside those deep, rumbling elephant calls.

How scientists cracked the elephant code

The research was led by behavioral ecologist Michael Pardo, a postdoctoral researcher at Colorado State University who collaborated with conservation groups Save the Elephants and ElephantVoices. The team drew on archival recordings from Kenya's Samburu and Buffalo Springs reserves and Amboseli National Park collected between 1986 and 2022. On top of that archive, the researchers conducted 14 months of dedicated new fieldwork spread across four years, following the herds by vehicle to record fresh low-frequency rumbles and carry out the playback experiments. In the end, the dataset included 469 different calls from 101 elephants, received by 117 recipients.


Elephants cannot exactly speak into a microphone and confirm what they meant, so the researchers used machine learning instead. They fed the calls into a model and asked a simple question: could it tell from sound alone which elephant a call was meant for? If elephant calls do not carry anything like a name, then the model should not have done any better than a random guess. However, the model correctly matched the call to the intended receiver in about 27.5 percent of cases, the study said. The authors said this was significantly above chance and above the algorithm's performance when tested against scrambled control data.

Why a 27.5% success rate is actually a big deal

The number might seem small to be convincing proof of the existence of “names,” but researchers were expecting this kind of reaction. Pardo has noted that names are not always used by elephants during all their rumbles, just as we do not always mention the name of someone while addressing them. According to the Nature Ecology & Evolution study, names could possibly appear only in some types of calls, like those made during long-distance communication or addressing calves; hence the limit of the frequency. So the researchers needed a rate well above random chance to convince themselves that something name-like was really there.

However, the scientists did not rely solely on the computer analysis. They carried out an experiment where a recorded elephant's vocalization addressed either to them or to another elephant was played to 17 wild elephants through a speaker. The study found that elephants responded more strongly to calls originally meant for them, moving toward the speaker more quickly and calling back more often than they did to calls meant for someone else. It was that behavioral response that turned a statistical pattern into evidence of recognition.

Not copycats like dolphins or parrots

Dolphins and parrots use naming as well; however, the mechanism of naming used by them consists of copying the signature whistle or call made by that particular animal. The 2013 study, ‘Bottlenose dolphins can use learned vocal labels to address each other,’ published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicates that bottlenose dolphins can recognize each other by learning the unique signature whistles produced by other dolphins and repeating them to call that particular dolphin's attention.

Elephants seem to operate differently. Researchers found no strong evidence that callers were imitating the receiver's rumble. Instead, the name-like component of the call appeared to be an arbitrary label, not related to the sound of the elephant being addressed, a quality that makes a human name a name rather than an impression, the researchers said. That's a separate question from how the playback test worked: playing an elephant a call addressed to it, rather than to someone else, tests whether it recognizes its “names”; it doesn't require that name to sound like the elephant's own voice, the way dolphin and parrot imitation does.

What this means going forward

The researchers are careful not to overstate their findings. They have not deciphered the full elephant vocabulary, and they do not yet know how much of each rumble is actually the "name," or whether things in elephants' environment, like water holes or food sources, also get labeled. Pardo and colleagues say further studies will help answer that. Still, the discovery adds elephants to a short but growing list of species known to use name-like vocalizations, including dolphins, parrots and, most recently, marmoset monkeys, whose name-like calls were documented in an August 2024 study, reinforcing the case that elephants' social lives are more cognitively complex than previously credited.