Elephants Found to Use Vocal Mimicry

Elephants have an unusual ability to mimic and learn new sounds, which scientists believe they use as a form of acoustic communication.

Birds, bats, primates and marine mammals do it, but this is the first time the trait has been found in elephants, said Joyce Poole of the Amboseli Elephant Research Project in Nairobi, Kenya.

“Elephants appear to be capable of imitating other sounds, including those that are not part of their repertoire,” Poole said.

She and her colleagues recorded a 10-year-old African female elephant named Mlaika who imitated truck sounds. She lived in a semicaptive group of orphaned elephants in Tsavo, Kenya.

Her night stockade was two miles from the Nairobi-Mombasa highway. She mimicked the truck sounds for several hours after sunset, which is the optimal time for transmission of low-frequency sounds in African savannas.

In another case, a 23-year-old African male elephant named Calimero, who was raised with Asian female elephants in Basel Zoo in Switzerland, learned chirping sounds, which are typical of Asian but not African elephants.

“It was probably trying to be part of that social group and to join in with them,” Poole said. “Eventually it became about the only sounds he made.”

The cases were reported Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Elephants live among others with whom they are closely bonded. But they are not with them all the time because their social groups change.

Poole and her colleagues believe vocal communication is used to maintain contact with other elephants and for individual and group recognition.

“It is yet another sign they are very intelligent and their communication is very complex,” Poole said.