ArticleScientific reports2016
Information content and acoustic structure of male African elephant social rumbles.
Article in Scientific reports, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed.
- Bone-conduction hearing in elephants and humans: a middle-ear comparative study.Frontiers in audiology and otology · 2026Article
- Effects of a short-term removal of the dominant male on vocalization in captive groups of large-billed crows (Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- "Age of risk" shapes simpler multimodal communication in the juvenile plains zebra (Equus quagga).Communications biology · 2025Article
- Female African elephant rumbles differ between populations and sympatric social groups.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Multimodal communication and audience directedness in the greeting behaviour of semi-captive African savannah elephants.Communications biology · 2024Article
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- A pachyderm perfume: odour encodes identity and group membership in African elephants.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Sound Visualization Demonstrates Velopharyngeal Coupling and Complex Spectral Variability in Asian Elephants.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Article
- Toward understanding the communication in sperm whales.iScience · 2022Review
- Operant control and call usage learning in African elephants.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Mouse vocal emission and acoustic complexity do not scale linearly with the size of a social group.The Journal of experimental biology · 2021Article
- Individual distinctiveness across call types of the southern white rhinoceros (Journal of mammalogy · 2021Article
- Acoustic structure and information content of trumpets in female Asian elephants (Elephas maximus).PloS one · 2021Article
- Article
- Acoustic allometry and vocal learning in mammals.Biology letters · 2020Review
- Ultrasonic signals associated with different types of social behavior of mice.Nature neuroscience · 2020Article
- Extracting physiological information in experimental biology via Eulerian video magnification.BMC biology · 2019Article
- Field Propagation Experiments of Male African Savanna Elephant Rumbles: A Focus on the Transmission of Formant Frequencies.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2018Article
- Software for improved field surveys of nesting marine turtles.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- Male African elephants discriminate and prefer vocalizations of unfamiliar females.Scientific reports · 2017Article
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2 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Until recently, the prevailing theory about male African elephants (Loxodonta africana) was that, once adult and sexually mature, males are solitary and targeted only at finding estrous females. While this is true during the state of 'musth' (a condition characterized by aggressive behavior and elevated androgen levels), 'non-musth' males exhibit a social system seemingly based on companionship, dominance and established hierarchies. Research on elephant vocal communication has so far focused on females, and very little is known about the acoustic structure and the information content of male vocalizations. Using the source and filter theory approach, we analyzed social rumbles of 10 male African elephants. Our results reveal that male rumbles encode information about individuality and maturity (age and size), with formant frequencies and absolute fundamental frequency values having the most informative power. This first comprehensive study on male elephant vocalizations gives important indications on their potential functional relevance for male-male and male-female communication. Our results suggest that, similar to the highly social females, future research on male elephant vocal behavior will reveal a complex communication system in which social knowledge, companionship, hierarchy, reproductive competition and the need to communicate over long distances play key roles.
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