Image courtesy of ElephantVoices
Joel
Kontinen
Elephants
appear to harmonise their vocal rumbles when they join together to form
choruses, tuning their voices to sound more alike as the chorus unfolds.
Elephants talk with each other with deep rumbling sounds.
“It’s sort
of like what humans do in conversation, where you almost start to adopt the
speaking patterns or accents of whoever you’re interacting with,” says Sara Keen
at Earth Species Project.
Elephants
communicate using a rich repertoire of body language, but also a wide range of sounds.
These include their iconic trumpet call, and also throatier roars. The most
common call is the rumble – so low-pitched it is often undetectable by humans –
which can travel up to 10 kilometres, transmitting long-distance information
that can potentially include the identity of the caller and what’s happening at
the time.
Joyce Poole at Elephant Voices, a
non-profit organisation based in Washington DC, that promotes the study and
protection of elephants, says scientists have long been intrigued by the
way elephants will rumble together in choruses. Studying those complex sounds,
however, has proved extremely difficult because it is hard to pick out any
given rumbling elephant in the chorus – what researchers call “the cocktail
party problem”.
Source:
Christa Lesté-Lasserre 2026
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