Abstract
Most studies on elephant vocal communication have focused on the low-frequency rumble, with less effort on other vocalization types such as the most characteristic elephant call, the trumpet. Yet, a better and more complete understanding of the elephant vocal system requires investigating other vocalization types and their functioning in more detail as well. We recorded adult female Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) at a private facility in Nepal and analyzed 206 trumpets from six individuals regarding their frequency, temporal and contour shape, and related acoustic parameters of the fundamental frequency. We also tested for information content regarding individuality and context. Finally, we recorded the occurrence of non-linear phenomena such as bifurcation, biphonation, subharmonics and deterministic chaos. We documented a mean fundamental frequency ± SD of 474 ± 70 Hz and a mean duration ± SD of 1.38 ± 1.46 s (Nindiv. = 6, Ncalls = 206). Our study reveals that the contour of the fundamental frequency of trumpets encodes information about individuality, but we found no evidence for trumpet subtypes in greeting versus disturbance contexts. Non-linear phenomena prevailed and varied in abundance among individuals, suggesting that irregularities in trumpets might enhance the potential for individual recognition. We propose that trumpets in adult female Asian elephants serve to convey an individual’s identity as well as to signal arousal and excitement to conspecifics.
Highlights
Elephants are highly social mammals that live in fission-fusion societies based on matriarchal female-bonded kin groups, from which males disperse when adolescent [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
While the vocal repertoire has been well described for the African savanna elephant Loxodonta africana [10,11,12,13,14], fewer studies have been done on Asian elephants Elephas maximus [but see 15–17]
This indicates that acoustic cues are individually distinctive enough to provide similar results even with the considerably smaller sample size used to calculate the discriminant function in the permuted discriminant function analysis (pDFA) compared to the discriminant function analysis (DFA)
Summary
Elephants are highly social mammals that live in fission-fusion societies based on matriarchal female-bonded kin groups, from which males disperse when adolescent [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. The ‘social complexity hypothesis’ for communication proposes that animals living in complex social systems do require a more complex vocal communication system, consisting of structurally and functionally distinct elements [9]. While the vocal repertoire has been well described for the African savanna elephant Loxodonta africana [10,11,12,13,14], fewer studies have been done on Asian elephants Elephas maximus [but see 15–17]. In-depth investigations on elephant vocalizations have mainly focused on low-frequency calls (rumbles) in African.
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