How Do Elephants Communicate? Rumbles Below Hearing, Feet That Listen and Names

Human hearing bottoms out around 20 hertz, and the fundamental of an elephant's rumble lies between about 14 and 24, with harmonics above that give the audible part a growling quality. Low frequencies travel far because the air absorbs them slowly, and at dusk, when the ground cools and a layer of cool air lies under warm, the rumbles are channelled along the surface and carry up to ten kilometres; elephants are most vocal in the early evening for that reason. The calls are made by the larynx, as in humans, and the vocal folds are long enough to produce the low notes by the same mechanism as a bass singer's, which was shown in 2012 by blowing air through the larynx of an elephant that had died.

Decades of recording, mostly by Katy Payne, Joyce Poole and their successors in Kenya, have matched calls to contexts, and the repertoire is large:

• •Contact rumbles: a family member out of sight calls and is answered, the exchange keeping a scattered family in touch across the bush
• •The let's-go rumble: a matriarch's call that starts the group moving, followed by a long series as she leads
• •Oestrus and musth calls: a female in oestrus rumbles in a pattern that draws males from many kilometres, and a musth male announces himself with a low pulsing rumble
• •Greeting ceremonies: reunited family members rumble, trumpet, spin, urinate and clash tusks in a display that can last minutes
• •Alarm calls: distinct rumbles for bees and for humans, with the human alarm differing between the Maasai, who spear elephants, and the Kamba, who do not
• •Trumpets, roars and snorts for excitement, distress and play, audible to everyone

A rumble travels through the ground as well as the air, as a seismic wave, and Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell showed in the 2000s that elephants detect it. They freeze, lean forward and press the fronts of their feet to the earth, and the fat pads of the feet and the bones of the toes, along with a bone in the ear adapted for conduction, pass the vibration to the inner ear; played the alarm rumble of a known family through the ground alone, with no sound in the air, elephants bunched and retreated. The seismic channel is slower than the air but carries further and through denser vegetation, and elephants appear to use both, the seismic wave arriving after the airborne one and giving, in principle, a bearing.

The most striking finding is recent. In 2024 a team analysing hundreds of contact and greeting rumbles from Kenyan elephants used a machine-learning model to predict which individual each call was addressed to, and it did better than chance, which meant the rumbles carried an addressee-specific signature; when the calls were played back, elephants responded more strongly to calls that had been addressed to them than to calls addressed to others. Unlike dolphins, which copy each other's signature whistles, the elephants were not imitating the receiver's own calls, so the label appeared to be arbitrary, which is what a name is. Elephants also communicate by touch, with the trunk on another's mouth, temple or genitals, by posture, ear position and the spread of the ears, and by smell, since the trunk can locate a scent in stereo and the temporal glands stream during musth.

The communication is the fabric of a society that runs on memory. Elephant families are led by a matriarch whose knowledge of water, routes and other elephants is what the family survives on, and older matriarchs, in playback experiments, tell the roar of a lion from that of a lioness and the calls of a hundred other elephants from strangers; when poachers kill the old females, the families lose the knowledge with them. Infrasound also explains the mystery of how groups of elephants kilometres apart converge on the same waterhole, and it complicates conservation, since the noise of roads and mines masks the frequencies they use. The animals that were assumed for a century to be mostly silent were talking the whole time at a pitch nobody was listening at.

Few mammals can learn to copy new sounds, a skill called vocal learning that humans, some whales and dolphins, seals and bats share with parrots and songbirds. Elephants turned out to be on the list. In 2005 researchers reported an orphaned African elephant in Kenya that produced sounds resembling the noise of passing trucks, which she heard regularly from a nearby road. Another African elephant, which had lived with Asian elephants in a zoo, made chirping calls typical of Asian elephants rather than of its own kind.

A more remarkable case came from Everland zoo in South Korea, where an Asian elephant named Koshik imitated several Korean words. He did it by putting the tip of his trunk inside his mouth to change its shape, a method nobody had seen before, and native speakers recognised the words in recordings. He is thought to have developed the habit because for years his main social contact was with humans. These cases matter because imitation of this kind is rare and is linked in other animals to complex social lives, supporting the idea that elephants learn parts of their communication rather than being born knowing it all.

One piece of elephant behaviour has been put to practical use by conservationists. Elephants are wary of African honeybees, which sting the soft skin around the eyes and inside the trunk, and when researchers in Kenya played recordings of disturbed bees to resting families, the elephants quickly moved away, shaking their heads and throwing dust. Lucy King and her colleagues, working with the charity Save the Elephants, wondered whether this fear could protect farms, where elephants raiding crops can destroy a family's harvest in a single night and sometimes kill the people who try to chase them off.

Their answer was the beehive fence. Hives are hung from a wire strung between posts around a field, so that an elephant pushing through sets them swinging and releases the bees. In trials the fences turned back most raiding elephants, and the farmers gained honey to sell, which gave them a reason to look after the fences rather than resent the animals. The idea has since been tried in many countries across Africa and Asia. It works because it relies on the elephants' own knowledge and their habit of warning one another, rather than on walls, guns or electric wire.

Elephant families are led by an older female, the matriarch, and her experience seems to help the whole group respond to danger. In a study published in 2011, researchers played recordings of lion roars to elephant families in Kenya. Families with older matriarchs reacted more strongly to the roars of male lions, which are more dangerous to elephants than females, bunching together defensively.

Families led by younger matriarchs often failed to make that distinction. The finding suggests that knowledge built up over decades helps a family judge threats correctly. It also helps explain why poaching that targets the oldest elephants, which carry the largest tusks, can harm the survival of families far more than the loss of numbers alone would suggest.

Elephants communicate with rumbles whose fundamental lies below the range of human hearing, produced by a larynx like ours, carrying up to ten kilometres through the air at dusk and further through the ground, where they are picked up by the feet and bones of the listener. The calls keep families in contact, coordinate movement, attract mates and warn of specific dangers, and the latest analysis finds that they carry individual labels that function as names, in a society whose survival depends on what its old females know.