Elephants imitate each other when they produce deep rumbling sounds

Elephants engage in a form of social mimicry when producing deep rumbling sounds, a discovery made through a machine learning study. The research, led by Sara Keen at Earth Species Project, reveals that elephants often harmonize their vocal rumbles while forming choruses, aligning their voices to sound more similar as the chorus unfolds.

This convergence is particularly likely to occur during specific social situations such as when elephants reconnect with one another, coordinate group activities, or greet close family members. The study, which analyzed 902 recordings of rumbles from wild female African savannah elephants in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park, suggests that vocal convergence may play a role in helping elephant families build a plan of action.

Sara Keen notes that this imitation of vocal patterns is similar to how humans adopt speaking patterns or accents when interacting with others. Elephant communication is multifaceted, involving body language, trumpeting calls, throatier roars, and the most common low-pitched rumbles, which can travel up to 10 kilometers, transmitting long-distance information.

Joyce Poole of ElephantVoices explains that scientists have long been intrigued by elephants' chorus behavior, although studying these complex sounds has been challenging due to the "cocktail party problem" of isolating individual rumbling elephants. The new findings, made possible by advancements in machine learning, reveal that elephant choruses carry multiple layers of information and vary in ways that encode details about the family's activities and future plans.

These insights into elephant communication and cognition could aid conservation efforts by helping researchers track elephant behavior and movement remotely.