Roaming the open bush and scrublands of sub-Saharan Africa, African savannah elephants communicate with each other through low-frequency rumbles, often occurring in overlapping choruses. This cacophony of sounds can be tricky to analyse – but a new study now reveals its intricacies and purpose.
The research was led by scientists from ElephantVoices and Earth Species Project, with collaborators from Amboseli Trust for Elephants. The findings are published in the journal Scientific Reports.
Overlapping, multi-caller vocalisations – often called choruses – are very common in the animal kingdom. They’re used by chimpanzees, sperm whales, male Atlantic spotted dolphins, green woodhoopoes and acorn woodpeckers, among many others.
These vocalisations can carry rich social information, so they’re very important to scientists – but they’re also difficult to study. Separating out the many overlapping voices in a chorus comes with a phenomenon known as the ‘cocktail party problem’, wherein the brain focuses on one particular stimulus, excluding the others.
Elephants communicate with very low-pitched rumbles (many of them below the range of human hearing). These rumbles encode several distinct...