I've Seen A Housefly, I've Seen a Horsefly...but I Ain't Never Seen an Elephant...Mimic?

Until recently it was known that many animals living complex social lives have the ability to learn and mimic vocalizations. This ability, seen in primates, bats, birds, and some marine mammals can be important for such a social lifestyle. Recently, as of March, this ability has been witnessed as well as researced in two captive African elephants as well.

One case comes from Tsavo, Kenya. An adolescent female African elephant was making low-pitched rumbling sounds. Mlaika, an elephant that belongs to a semi-captive groupd of orphaned elephants, was often heard for hours at dusk and into the night. Just after dusk and into the night is the most optimal time for low-frequency sounds to be transmitted in the African savannah. The stockade where the elephants are kept during the night is located about two miles from the Nairobi-Mombasa highway. Joyce Poole, research director of the Amboseli Elephant Research Project, was quoted saying,

I sometimes couldn't distinguish the sounds of the trucks from Mlaika calling.

The Amboseli Elephant Research Project is found in Sandefjord, Norway.

Another case was witnessed with a 23-year-old African elephant named Calimero that has been living in the Basel Zoo in Switzerland with two other Asian elephants. Over time the African elephant has learned to call to his Asian elephant companions mimicking their chirpy calls instead of the African elephant calls of his own species.

Peter Tyack, who specializes in vocalized mimicking in marine mammals, and Poole made some statistical comparisons between the mimicked calls and the sounds in which it was thought they were trying to mimic. They came to the conclusion that these elephants were indeed trying to copy sounds that they were exposed to. Poole also has the belief that Asian elephants will share the ability to mimic sounds like the African elephant species. There was article uncovered that detailed an adult Asian elephant that knew how to whistle. By holding its trunk a certain way it could provide a whistling sound. This ability was witnessed and studied by a younger Asian elephant and eventually acquired. Now that it is known of this certain ability the next step is to understand why they mimic and how their skills help them in their natural habitats.

In the two cases of the African elephants it seems that these elephants were mimicking sounds out of boredom. We know that elephants are some of the smarter animals we have encountered and their being held in captivity can definitely lead to a case of extreme boredom. All three elephants have learned calls that go far beyond their normal repertoire showing us just how smart they actually are.

Elephants live in tight social groups within their large foraging grounds. As time goes on it has been said that elephants may switch between groups so these calls could be used as individual as well as group recognition (just like the prairie warblers with their opened B-songs). It has been studied and is now known that elephants can hear and recognize other elephants up to a mile and half away. They often use low-pitched frequencies because these sounds travel easily in the night of the savannah. This could be the reason that Mlaika picked up on the truck sounds during the night. According to Poole,

Vocal learning could be used to maintain individual-specific social bonds in the complex and fluid society of elephants, where members of a social groupd come and go, keeping in contact over long distances and maintaining close social bonds over lifetimes.

Sources: http://www.phschool.com/science/science_news/articles/big_mimics.html

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/30067/story.htm

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/03/0323_050323_elephantnoise_2.html

posted by: Jesse Graham Thomas (4)