Elephants Call Each Other by Name

Did you know that elephants could have names? In this video, Insoo Hyun, Director of the Center for Life Sciences at the Museum of Science, tells us about the study in the scientific journal Nature, Ecology & Evolution that revealed this amazing fact! For 36 years, researchers recorded African elephant calls at a reserve in Kenya. They determined that specific sounds may be linked to individual elephants, because when they played an elephant’s “name” sound over a loudspeaker that elephant would get excited and move towards the speaker. Because of this, scientists believe that elephants use first names!