Two New Discoveries in Animal Sciences
The more we learn, the blurrier the line between us and the rest of the animal kingdom becomes
Hiya!
I don’t know what’s going on, but it seems animal scientists are on a roll. It feels like we’re learning more about animals now than ever before, and everything we discover is forcing us to redefine what it means to be Human.
Seeing reports of new similarities between us and other animals is practically a weekly occurrence these days. So today, I’m going to tell you about two of them, both of which remind us, yet again, that we aren’t as different from the rest of the animal kingdom as we assume.
Elephants Have Names
Like us, elephants are highly social and intelligent creatures with several communication methods, one of which is “seismic communication,” but it’s better well known as “rumbling” or “rumbles” because that’s what it sounds like to us.
An elephant’s rumble is transmitted through the air as sound but also through the ground as seismic vibrations. The furthest an elephant rumble has been measured traveling through air was about 1,013 feet (309 meters) per second and between about 813 and 866 feet (248 and 264 meters) per second through the ground. This allows elephant herds to spread out as they roam without losing contact with each other.
Now, in a new paper published on the preprint server BioRxiv in August 2023, researchers announced that African savannah elephants appear to use something like names to identify specific individuals within their social groups.
For the study, an international team of researchers from the United States, Kenya, and Norway recorded and analyzed 625 total elephant calls. The calls came from two areas in Kenya. The majority (527 calls) came from elephants in northern Kenya living in the greater Samburu ecosystem, while the remaining 98 calls were recorded in the Amboseli National Park in southern Kenya.
The team was able to identify 119 rumbles that were specific to individuals by determining which female elephant members and their offspring were separated from the group when each rumble was made, and who approached the group shortly after the call. A computer model correctly identified the receivers of 20 percent of the 625 total recorded calls.
This means the elephants weren’t making generic calls aimed at groups, such as mothers or adolescents, but were distinct to specific elephants. Further, the elephants responded to recorded playbacks of the calls originally addressed to them more often than they responded to calls directed at a different elephant. The researchers believe this suggests elephants can tell when a call is addressed to them specifically.
In other words, it appears elephants have names, or at least something like them. If true, it makes them the first non-human animal (that we know of) to use distinct sounds to identify a specific individual. Whereas when animals like parrots or dolphins call out, they’re basically yelling their own name and the receiver imitates the call in response.
Speaking of dolphins...
Dolphins Use Baby Talk
Before I tell you about the study, let’s talk about baby talk for a second. We all basically know what baby talk is, it’s when we change the pitch of our voices, usually into a higher range, and speak in a sing-songy manner. As the phrase implies, we typically do this when talking to babies (and fur babies), but there is an important distinction to make.
For language scientists, “baby talk” implies more than tonal changes but often makes a mess of a language’s structure, like saying, “Wook at dose widdle toesies-woesies.” Instead, they prefer the term “motherese,” which the 2021 Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science defines as:
“[Motherese] can be done in a variety of ways, such as using simplified speech, repeating words, shortening sentences, as well as altering the acoustic properties of speech such as using higher pitch, increased pitch range, more pitch variability, and slowing down their speech rate.”
Research continually shows that motherese makes a difference in early child development. Vocal changes grab and hold children’s attention far better than when adults speak normally, and when parents were coached on how to use motherese, their children babbled more and had a larger vocabulary by toddlerhood.
Meanwhile, dolphins communicate in a wholly different way than we do. First of all, the typical dolphin vocalization consists of a whistle that is unique to each one. National Geographic explains it’s a sound that “serves as the cetacean equivalent of a ‘Hello, My Name is…’ sticker.”
When dolphins call out to others, they whistle their unique sound and wait for another dolphin to respond with their own whistle rather than mimicking the caller’s back to them. But now, a new study that was three decades in the making announced in June 2023 that bottlenose dolphins use motherese when communicating with their calves.
A marine biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Hampshire College in Massachusetts, Laela Sayigh and her colleagues analyzed data collected over three decades during brief catch-and-release events of wild bottlenose dolphins near Sarasota Bay, Florida.
The Sarasota Dolphin Research Program performs regular veterinary exams on wild dolphins in the area, and over time, the dolphins have grown used to the scientists’ presence, which allowed the researchers to collect their data.
Sometimes, Sayigh and the other researchers stuck a hydrophone (a recording device) to a mother dolphin’s forehead during an exam using a suction cup, then later removed it. Over 34 years, Sayigh studied the recordings of 19 female dolphins and discovered the signature calls of mother dolphins had greater frequency ranges when their calves were close by.
More specifically, the mother’s typical high pitches became even higher, and the lower tones even lower when their offspring were nearby. The higher tones reach pitches well beyond human hearing abilities. The team published their findings in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in June 2023.
Granted, we can’t know for sure if the dolphins are engaging in motherese, but if they are, it would make them the first non-human species to do so. However, they wouldn’t be the only non-human animals to change their calls when addressing youth — squirrel monkeys, rhesus macaques, and zebra finches do, too, but in different ways.
Perspective Shift
Our species has always had a special relationship with other animals and likely learned a lot from observing them. We trailed animals as they migrated with the seasons. We saw wise spirits within them and worshiped gods resembling them. Unfortunately, our attitudes toward animals have changed immensely, especially over the last 10,000 years. Now we have cities separating us, and the only time most people see wildlife in real life is at the zoo.
Maybe we’re making our way back, though. Maybe everything animal scientists are discovering these days will help show people that we have more in common with other animals than we currently assume. Perhaps this knowledge will stir something deep within them, like a memory buried by the subconscious, that reminds them of the connections we have with Nature. Regardless, I wonder what else we have in common with animals. If dolphins really do use baby talk, and elephants have names, it makes me excited for what else animal scientists will discover next.
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Fascinating