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Text:
Marie Le Breton
Imitation has hitherto been regarded as the preserve
of humans, monkeys, birds and a handful of other
species. But now it seems they have competition
from a couple of heavyweight contenders: two African
elephants called Mlaika and Calimero, whose talents
were discovered by a team of scientists*.
Mlaika
is a 10-year-old female living in semi-captivity
in Kenya’s Tsavo National Park. At night,
she returns to her enclosure 3 kilometres away from
the Nairobi-Mombasa road, an acoustic stimulus which
seems to have inspired her: instead of trumpeting
like others of her species, Mlaika makes a noise
like passing trucks (recorded and verified by spectrogram)!
Different context, same phenomenon. This time the
imitator is a 23-year-old male who has spent the
last 18 years in a Swiss zoo with two Asian elephants.
African pachyderms normally sound quite different
when they trumpet, but Calimero grew up imitating
the “warbling” noise emitted
by his Asian cousins.
Elephants’ ability to
modify the noises they make could be used to identify
each other and to maintain specific individual links –between
parent and offspring for example– within the
family or herd. This is vital in the case of social
groups which, like dolphins, bats and some birds,
experience alternate periods of separation and togetherness.
For the scientists, the next step is to determine
whether each family of elephants has its own dialect… or
should we say trumpet solo?
* Kenya’s
Amboseli Trust for Elephants; the Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institute; the University of Vienna (Austria).
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