Wild African elephants appear to call each other by individual names, after researchers who recorded hundreds of rumbling calls in Kenya found that when a recording was played back through a speaker, the elephant it was "addressed" to perked up and answered — while others standing nearby ignored it

Wild African elephants appear to call each other by individual names, after researchers who recorded hundreds of rumbling calls in Kenya found that when a recording was played back through a speaker, the elephant it was "addressed" to perked up and answered — while others standing nearby ignored it

In two Kenyan national parks, a team of biologists spent 14 months following elephants in a vehicle and recording every rumble the animals made. Over the four years the wider project ran, they compiled a specific dataset that included 469 identifiable calls. For each call, they knew which elephant had made the sound and, based on the specific social context, which elephant was being addressed. When they fed the recordings into a machine-learning…