Scientists from Kenya, the USA, and France concluded that the collective sounds of African elephants are not merely a set of isolated vocalizations, but a complex, structured signal containing important contextual information.
The study analyzed 902 audio recordings of wild savanna elephant rumbles collected in Amboseli National Park, located in Kenya. Based on this data, scientists developed and trained specialized classifiers.
The classifier, trained to recognize individual rumbles, demonstrated the ability to determine the specific circumstances under which a full chorus occurred. The accuracy of this determination was twice as high as random guessing.
The results of this work were officially published in the scientific journal Scientific Reports.