• AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    17 days ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    That’s according to a provocative new study in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, which was inspired by earlier work showing that bottlenose dolphins have signature whistles.

    “Sometimes another bottlenose dolphin will imitate somebody else’s signature whistle in order to get their attention, so effectively calling them by name,” says Mickey Pardo, a biologist at Cornell University.

    And elephants make these particular noises in all kinds of contexts — everything from greeting family members to comforting a calf to staying in touch with relatives over long distances.

    What they found is that their model was able to identify the correct elephant recipient of the call 27.5% of the time, which is much better than it performed during a control analysis that fed it random data, says Pardo.

    The results of those playback experiments looked “very convincing,” says Karl Berg, a biologist at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

    “I’d really like to be able to isolate the name of specific individual elephants,” says Pardo, “because if we could do that, we could answer a lot of other questions that we weren’t able to fully figure out in this study.”


    The original article contains 952 words, the summary contains 190 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!