What if animals used names like we do — not just sounds, but unique vocal labels to call out to one another across the wild? A groundbreaking study recently confirmed that African elephants do just that, revealing one of the rarest forms of communication in the animal kingdom. For Dr. Joyce Poole, co-author of the study and Scientific Director of ElephantVoices, the discovery is part of a lifetime spent listening to elephants and decoding their rich, emotional world.

In this intimate conversation, Poole reflects on what first drew her to elephants as a child in East Africa, the pivotal moments that shaped her decades-long career, and what it means to truly hear and understand another species. From early discoveries of infrasound to the recent revelation of elephant “names,” Poole shares the wonder, heartbreak, and urgency of protecting these intelligent, socially complex beings.

Note: For listening to the audio clips included throughout, the use of headphones is recommended.

Bioneers: What first sparked your interest in elephants, and what has motivated you throughout your long career studying elephant behavior?

Joyce Poole: I was very fortunate to grow up in Africa. My family moved there when I was just six years old, and I met my first elephant in Amboseli. My family was living in Malawi at the time, and we drove all the way to Kenya in our Land Rover. I asked my father, “What would happen if the elephant charges at the car?” He said, “Well, it could squish the car down to the size of a pea pod.” We ended up being charged by the elephant, and I hid under the Land Rover seat, as my father stalled the car. As a six-year-old, it was pretty scary, of course, but also impressive. Growing up, we were often on safari during our school holidays, and I had lots of interactions with elephants, but that was the first.

Another key moment came when I was 11. I was lucky enough to go to a lecture by Jane Goodall at the National Museums of Kenya, and I turned to my mother then and said, “That’s what I want to do when I grow up: study animals.” My father was later offered a job back in Kenya, running the African Wildlife Foundation’s Nairobi office. At the time, I was 19 and had just finished my first year at university. I said, “Well, I’m not going to be left behind. I want to take a year off.” My parents agreed to that, so long as I applied myself to a worthwhile project. I was so lucky, because that worthwhile project turned out to be elephants in Amboseli, where I had first been charged by an elephant.

That was in 1975 at the beginning of a generation of behavioral ecologists. Iain Douglas Hamilton had just completed the first study of individually known wild African elephants, and Cynthia Moss, the woman who founded the Amboseli Elephant Research Project, was just beginning hers. I joined Cynthia in Amboseli. Being among the first to study individually known elephants meant there were countless discoveries waiting to be made. I soon found that male African elephants have a sexual cycle and come into a period of heightened sexual and aggressive behavior called musth. This phenomenon had been known about for centuries in Asian elephants, but those who came before me, all of whom were men, said it didn’t exist in African elephants. Cynthia and I documented musth in African elephants in a paper published in Nature in 1981. Making a major discovery at a young age and having my first publication in such a prestigious journal really propelled me forward.

Bioneers: When did you start paying attention to the different types of sounds that elephants made and in what context they made them? 

Poole: During my early work on musth, I noticed that when musth males threatened me, they approached flapping their ears in a characteristic way, and making a kind of soft ga-dunk, ga-dunk, ga-dunk sound, like water flowing through a deep tunnel. At first, I was puzzled whether the sound I was hearing was a vocalization or just the vigorous flapping of their large ears. And I thought it was so strange that these very aggressive, enormous animals were threatening me with a sound that I could barely hear. Gradually, I realized that the ga-dunk-ga-dunk sound was a type of rumble vocalization. 

While elephants are well known to trumpet and roar, their most common vocalizations are deep harmonic sounds known as rumbles. I named those made by males in musth, musth-rumbles. It was then, around 1984, that I began to suspect that elephants were producing some sound that we couldn’t hear. And it turned out that in addition to audible sound, they were producing very low-frequency sound below the level of human hearing. Females and calves are much more vocal than the males, and I became very interested in the huge variety of vocalizations they made and the contexts in which they gave them.

I was put in touch with Katy Payne, who studied humpback whales and co-produced “Songs of the Humpback Whale” with her then-husband, Roger Payne. Because of her work with whales, Katy had gotten a similar hunch about Asian elephants. While visiting a zoo, she became aware of this sort of fluttering sensation in her chest when she was in the presence of elephants. When I contacted her, she was preparing to return to the zoo with a microphone capable of recording very low-frequency sound. I told her that if she found that Asian elephants were producing infrasound, she should come to Kenya so we could record African elephants together. Her hunch about Asian elephants was correct and together Katy and I found that all of the different rumbles produced by adult African elephants contain infrasonic components — some are so loud and powerful that they carry several kilometers and others fall completely below the range of human hearing and can only be detected through the use of sensitive recording equipment and observed on spectrograms.

Bioneers: What were some of the first observations you made of elephants that made you suspect they addressed each other by calls akin to names? What do these calls sound like, and in what contexts are they typically used?

Poole: Females live in multi-generational families generally made up of several related adult females and their offspring, which can range from just a mother and her calves to up to 50 or more individuals. Elephant families are very tightly bonded. Like our human families, they’re not together all the time — they may split up for a couple of hours, a day, a week or more. When family members reunite after having been separated, they greet one another with a special rumble and greeting ceremony.

But when they’re apart, they use what we call contact rumbles to try to find one another. An elephant will give this very powerful rumble, often with the head raised and the mouth open, and will then listen afterwards. You’ll see the elephant spreading her ears and turning her head from side to side, trying to localize an answer. Often, we don’t hear that answer because the elephant that she’s calling may be quite far away, but we can pick it up on a spectrogram. It was through observing these contact calls and answers that I started to suspect that elephants might be using something like names for one another.

We would see an elephant give a contact rumble, and then observe one particular elephant answer, and everyone else in the group would carry on feeding or just ignore the calling elephant. At the time, I thought a contact rumble was a general call to the family, and so, I wondered why these elephants were ignoring her. Then maybe a half hour later, she would give another contact rumble, and somebody totally different would answer. I started thinking, Well, does she have some way of directing that call to particular individuals? I thought then that maybe they had names for one another, but I didn’t dare suggest that. In my book published in 1996, Coming of Age With Elephants, I wrote instead that perhaps they had some way of referring to particular individuals, such as a sister or an eldest daughter.

Then, in 1998, something interesting happened. I was told that some orphan elephants rescued by the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust were making a very weird sound that no one had ever heard before, and I was invited to record their voices. The Trust rescues orphaned baby elephants and slowly reintroduces them to the wild. These particular orphans were being kept in an enclosure at Tsavo National Park at night when, I was told, they made the sound. I’d been listening to elephants for so long, and I was quite skeptical that it was a sound that I hadn’t heard before. I went to the enclosure with my recording gear, and dusk fell. Suddenly, there was this weird didgeridoo sound. Woooooouuuu. It lasted about 14 seconds. “What was that?” I asked.

I just couldn’t believe it. I recorded from the orphans for several nights. I began to notice that when I had my earphones on, I was finding it difficult to differentiate between the sounds the elephants were making and the drone of the trucks on the Mombasa road three kilometers away. I thought, This is really weird. Are these elephants imitating trucks? gain, I thought, No, I can’t go and tell people elephants are imitating trucks. It’s too strange. No one would believe me. It was some years later, in 2004 or so, that Angela Stöeger, who also studies elephant communication, got in touch with me.

She was working at the Vienna Zoo, where an African male elephant was housed together with two Asian females. She wrote to tell me that it appeared that the male African elephant was imitating the chirping sounds that are distinct to Asian elephants. She sent recordings of the sounds they were making. The chirp made by Asian elephants is an ark-ark-ark sound, and this male African elephant was definitely chirping. It was lower in frequency, but it was definitely an attempt to copy these females.

Angela asked if I’d ever heard anything like that. I said, “Oh my God, I have all these recordings of elephants that I think are imitating trucks.” We approached Peter Tyack and Stephanie Watwood, who studied vocal imitation in dolphins. Together, we wrote a paper, which was published in Nature in 2005, showing that elephants are capable of vocal learning.

Mickey Pardo, who led the elephant names study, was aware of our earlier work and questioned why elephants have this ability to create or imitate sounds and how they might use this ability in their daily lives. That’s part of what prompted the study.

Bioneers: How do the “vocal labels” used by elephants differ from the imitative calls used by dolphins and parrots, and what does it indicate about their cognitive abilities?

Poole: Although elephants can imitate, we found no indication that they were imitating one another in these cases. We found the strongest evidence of vocal labels in contact rumbles and in the rumbles that mothers and allomothers give to infants. Considering that infants haven’t even learned how to rumble yet, the females couldn’t be imitating them. This ability to create and use names really expands elephants’ expressive power, because vocal labels are arbitrary, rather than imitations of the animal they’re calling. Most human words are arbitrary, and that arbitrariness is really crucial to language, because it enables communication about referents that are not dependent on imitating and could be more cognitively demanding. It requires individuals to make an abstract connection between a sound and a referent.

Bioneers: You’ve studied the importance of social learning and role models in elephant society and have documented that large adult males in musth can influence the occurrence of musth in younger males. Can you describe the destructive behavior that was being engaged in by a group of cull orphans and what changed after large males were introduced to the population?

Poole: In South Africa, it used to be common practice to cull elephant populations. For example, wildlife managers would decide that Kruger National Park should only have X number of elephants. Each year, they would do a count, and if there were “too many”, they would kill the excess. It’s pretty horrific. The practice involved rounding up families and shooting them from helicopters, often with scoline, a drug that immobilized them but left them cognizant. Then they would land the chopper and kill them. But they would leave calves between two to four years old alive. They then rounded up these youngsters and used them to repopulate, or as founders in new national parks or private game reserves. Basically, people could buy these baby elephants to start their own elephant population.

Fifty-one such babies were dumped in Pilanesberg National Park in the early 1980s and left there to fend for themselves without any older individuals. It was really a bad experiment. These young elephants ran around in a band together. When the males became teenagers, some started coming into musth early and became very aggressive. In a normal population, males come into musth when they are 25-30 years old, and each male is on his own sexual cycle. The older a male is, the higher his rank, the longer he stays in musth. Older males suppress musth in younger individuals. But in Pilanesberg, there were no older males.

Teenage males who had experienced extreme trauma as calves and had grown up without role models started coming into musth. They started mounting rhinoceroses and killing them. They began attacking vehicles. There were a lot of really aggressive incidents happening. In addition to the trauma and lack of role models, there were no older musth males to suppress musth in the younger individuals. The wildlife authorities contacted me and asked if I had any idea what to do. I suggested that they bring in a couple of older males from Kruger, and that solved the problem.

Bioneers: You’ve also been involved in studies that have shown the importance of older matriarchs in decision-making. What’s an example of how matriarchs influence the decisions of other elephants?

Poole: Elephant families are pretty democratic. Anyone can suggest a course of action using a “let’s go” rumble, pointing her body in the direction she wants to go and engaging in a series of other gestures indicating her wish to depart. While matriarchs and older adult females most often engage in this behavior, younger females, who play an important leadership role in the family, also try to influence where the family goes on a particular day. Often, though, the matriarch will just slap her ears very hard against her body, like, “Heads up, guys, I’m taking off,” and then she just heads off, and they’re expected to follow — if they want to stick with her.

Where you really see the importance of older matriarchs is when a family faces a threat. Then there is no doubt who the leader is as the family runs to her side and follows her lead. We saw this extraordinary teamwork on a daily basis in Gorongosa, Mozambique, where the elephants we studied still felt threatened by people a quarter of a century after the population had been decimated for their ivory during the civil war.

We have also found that elephant families with young matriarchs gravitate toward and join up with families with older matriarchs and follow their leadership. Likewise, Caitlin O’Connell has found that in groups of males, younger individuals follow the calls and leadership of older individuals.

In a study led by Graeme Shannon and Karen McComb, we used playbacks of contact rumbles recorded in Amboseli and Pilanesberg to look at the decision-making abilities of elephants in the two populations. Females in intact Amboseli families led by older matriarchs were much better at social discrimination than females in Pilanesburg, where families were led by young elephants who had been exposed to extreme trauma and orphaned by culling. Our work showed that key decision-making abilities that are fundamental to elephant societies can be significantly altered by the long-term exposure to severely disruptive events such as culling and translocation.

Bioneers: ElephantVoices maintains a database of elephant sounds and gestures, the Elephant Ethogram, which documents around 400 elephant behaviors including written descriptions, sounds, photographs and more than 2,400 video examples. What are the main goals of this initiative? 

Poole: Since my early study of musth, I’ve been interested in how elephants signal to one another, both their vocal communication and their body language. I have published numerous papers describing many of these vocalizations and gestures and given them names — such as ear-folding, ear-waving, musth-rumble, let’s-go-rumble, ear-lifting, etc, but it is hard for other people to understand exactly what I am describing through just the written word or via a spectrogram. Likewise, other scientists have described elephant behavior using different terminology. I felt that there was a need to document elephant behavior with video so that we could use a common language to understand what we were observing.  

My husband and ElephantVoices co-founder and CEO, Petter Granli, and I had long studied elephants in Amboseli and the Maasai Mara in Kenya, where elephants are very habituated to people. Then in 2012, we went to work in Gorongosa in Mozambique, where 90% of the elephant population had been killed for their ivory during the 1977-1992 Civil War. They were shot from helicopters, shot from vehicles — and they really didn’t like people. We witnessed an extraordinary array of defensive behaviors that we didn’t typically see in Amboseli and the Mara. How they were signaling to one another was extraordinary and complex.

In 2012-2013, we were involved in the making of a five-part series, Gorongosa Park: Rebirth of Paradise, that was filmed by my brother, Bob Poole. In an agreement with the producers, ElephantVoices was given permission to use the raw footage for science and education. Later, we made a similar arrangement with the footage my brother shot in the Mara about a family of elephants that we were studying, and Petter and I returned to Amboseli to document all the reproductive behavior with video. Armed with some 13 terabytes of footage, we began to make clips of all of the behaviors we’d named and documented over the years and to see what else we would find as we scrolled through the footage. 

And why? Because here I am, I’m almost 70. I have this knowledge that I carry with me, and I love to share what I’ve learned. I’m happy for people to understand these extraordinary creatures with whom we share the planet. I think it is important. I don’t want someone else to have to start from scratch again. Also, when you read a scientific paper, there’s typically no video to demonstrate the behavior described, and usually the paper focuses on just a few behaviors. The communication that defines elephants is more than just a couple of sounds and a couple of behaviors. It’s incredibly complex, and we wanted to take a stab at documenting everything that we were aware of. In addition to the Elephant Ethogram, we also have a separate offline database that contains elephant vocalizations. At the moment, we’ve got around 11,000 records of individually known elephants giving calls in particular contexts.

Bioneers: What could a deeper understanding of elephants, including elephant communications and behaviors, mean for conservation and the protection of elephants?

Poole: In the years that I’ve been studying elephants, we’ve gone from people thinking that you can just hunt them as you like, or round them all up and kill them, or send them off to a zoo, or use them in the circus. Even moving them around in captivity or across the world, as if they’re furniture, without regard to their individual trauma, the impact on families, and the consequences for their survival. But based on the long-term studies of individually known elephants and their families, studies that have now been going on for 50 years, we’ve learned so much about elephants as individuals and about the devastating consequences of the ways we’ve treated them.

The more we learn, the more understanding we have of them. It wasn’t so long ago that people said to me, “What? Elephants communicate?” I think people thought, Well, humans communicate, but animals don’t talk to one another. They just make sounds that don’t have any kind of meaning. But now people have begun to realize that the sounds that elephants and other species make hold meaning. I hope that by understanding them, we will be better at seeing their perspective, better at sharing the little remaining space on this planet with them.

Regarding the recent study, I think the idea that elephants have names for one another really struck people quite deeply. It is a novel concept for us humans to imagine, but think of it — why shouldn’t they? Mothers and daughters live together for perhaps close to 50 years. They care about one another. They live in a fission-fusion society like ours — going their separate ways on the savannah, and to find one another, they call each other by name.

If they can create and use names for one another, what stops them from creating and using place names, object names, and names for predators? What stops them from creating words or sounds — whatever you want to call them — that help them to navigate their increasingly complex world? Now they are not just living with other wild species on the plains, but are having to navigate an increasingly complex environment in which there are humans.

We know from watching their behavior and also from satellite collar data that they are very finely tuned into our movement. They listen in. They know when people go to sleep. They know when it’s safe to leave the boundaries of the park. They learn really, really quickly. They’re also smart enough to cooperate on crop raiding expeditions, to short electric fences, to avoid the full moon when humans are more active.

In addition to their sizeable brains and complex social behavior, they’re endowed with some talents that we don’t have. For example, with their incredible sense of smell, they know when the onions underground are perfectly ripe. They use all their senses — their extraordinary sense of smell and hearing, and the ability to pick up vibrations through their feet — to monitor us and outsmart us. If we want to live together with them, side by side, it’s probably wise for us to try to understand them.