# African elephants address one another with individually specific calls

We investigated the hypothesis that elephants address individual members of their family group with name-like calls. We recorded contact, greeting, and caregiving rumbles from wild African elephants in Samburu & Buffalo Springs National Reserves, northern Kenya and Amboseli National Park, southern Kenya, noting when possible the identity of the caller and the identity of the receiver. We measured a suite of acoustic features on each call and found that calls were specific to individual receivers and receiver identity could be predicted from call structure at better than chance levels. We also played back calls to the elephants and found that elephants responded more quickly and vocalized more in response to calls that were originally addressed to them compared to calls from the same caller that were originally addressed to someone else. These results provide the first evidence that elephants address one another...