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Wild elephants may have names that other elephants use to call them
Forget names like "Dumbo"—wild elephants appear to have their own unique names that other elephants use while talking to them in low rumbles.
“Sometimes another bottlenose dolphin will imitate somebody else's signature whistle in order to get their attention, so effectively calling them by name,” says Mickey Pardo, a biologist at Cornell University. And elephants make these particular noises in all kinds of contexts — everything from greeting family members to comforting a calf to staying in touch with relatives over long distances. What they found is that their model was able to identify the correct elephant recipient of the call 27.5% of the time, which is much better than it performed during a control analysis that fed it random data, says Pardo.
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