Two animals coin unexpected sounds as a surprising form of social communication.
Abstract
There are a few mammalian species that can modify their vocalizations in response to auditory experience1 — for example, some marine mammals use vocal imitation for reproductive advertisement, as birds sometimes do. Here we describe two examples of vocal imitation by African savannah elephants, Loxodonta africana, a terrestrial mammal that lives in a complex fission–fusion society2. Our findings favour a role for vocal imitation that has already been proposed for primates, birds, bats and marine mammals: it is a useful form of acoustic communication that helps to maintain individual-specific bonds within changing social groupings3,4.
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References
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Supplementary information
Supplementary Methods
This file summarizes the sample of elephant calls and truck sounds, describes the acoustic analysis methods, presents a detailed acoustic analysis of Mlaika's truck-like calls and Calimero's chirp-like calls, and presents the discriminant analyses used for figure 2B and 2C. (DOC 39 kb)
Supplementary Table 1
Summary of acoustic data recorded from African elephants, Asian elephants, and sounds of trucks used in "Elephants capable of vocal learning." (DOC 51 kb)
Supplementary Table 2
Descriptive statistics for all samples of imitations and model sounds (DOC 31 kb)
Supplementary Table 3
Tabulation of all significant Mann Whitney U tests for duration, bandwidth, minimum and maximum frequencies comparing Mlaika's truck like calls, non-truck like calls, and truck sounds to African elephant adolescent/adults, calves and truck sounds. Similar tabulation comparing Calimero's chirp-like calls to African elephant adolescent/adults, African elephant calves and Asian elephants. (DOC 26 kb)
Supplementary Audio 1 Mlaika imitating truck.wav
This audio file starts with the sound of a truck followed by Mlaika's imitation. (WAV 1142 kb)
Supplementary Audio 2 Calimero chirp-like call.wav
This audio file is a recording of Calimero producing a chirp-like call (WAV 43 kb)
Supplementary Audio 3 Female Asian elephant chirp.wav
This audio file is a recording of an adult female Asian elephant producing a chirp call (WAV 78 kb)
Supplementary Figure 1
Spectrogram of the Supplementary Audio file 1 Mlaika imitating truck.wav. This figure provides an example of a paired truck sound and truck-like call. (DOC 67 kb)
Supplementary Figure 2
Spectrograms of the Supplementary Audio file 2 Calimero chirp-like call.wav and Supplementary Audio 3 Female Asian elephant chirp.wav. (PDF 97 kb)
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Poole, J., Tyack, P., Stoeger-Horwath, A. et al. Elephants are capable of vocal learning. Nature 434, 455–456 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/434455a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/434455a
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