Researchers: Elephants can tell the difference between human languages 
 
 By Agence France-Presse 
 
 Monday, March 10, 2014 16:25 EDT 
 
 African elephants can differentiate between human languages and move away from those considered a threat, a skill they have honed to survive in the wild, researchers said Monday. 
 
 The study suggests elephants, already known to be intelligent creatures, are even more sophisticated than previously believed when it comes to understanding human dangers. 
 
 African elephants (Loxodonta africana) are the largest land animals on Earth and are considered a vulnerable species due to habitat loss and illegal hunting for their ivory tusks. 
 
 Researchers played recordings of human voices for elephants at Amboseli National Park in Kenya to see how they would respond, according to a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 
 
 Some of the voices were from local Maasai men, a group that herds cattle and sometimes comes into conflict with elephants over access to water and grazing space. Occasionally, elephants are killed in clashes with Maasai men, and vice-versa. 
 
 Other recorded voices were from Kamba men, who tend to be farmers or employees of the national park, and who rarely represent a danger to elephants. 
 
 Still other voices tested on the elephants included female Maasai speakers and young boys. 
 
 All were saying the same phrase: “Look, look over there, a group of elephants is coming.” 
 
 The recorded voices were played for hundreds of elephants across 47 family groups during daylight hours. 
 
 When elephants heard the adult male Maasai voices, they tended to gather together, start investigative smelling with their trunks, and move cautiously away. 
 
 But when elephants heard females, boys, or adult male Kamba speakers, they did not show concern. 
 
 - Discriminating between languages - 
 
 “The ability to distinguish between Maasai and Kamba men delivering the same phrase in their own language suggests that elephants can discriminate between different languages,” said co-author Graeme Shannon, a visiting fellow in psychology at the University of Sussex. 
 
 That is not the same as understanding what the words mean, but still shows that elephants can decipher the more sing-songy Maasai language from the Kamba tongue, perhaps based on inflections, use of vowels, and other cues. 
 
 “It is very sophisticated what the elephants are doing,” said Keith Lindsay, a conservation biologist and member of the scientific advisory committee of the Amboseli Elephant Research Project. 
 
 “A lot of animals will take flight at just the general threat posed by people, but a smart animal doesn’t do that,” he told AFP. 
 
 “Their response to hearing Maasai men talking was to be alert, to move away, but not to run away in total fear,” added Lindsay, who was not involved in the study. 
 
 “It is suggesting that elephants are capable of thinking, (of) recognizing that if Maasai men are talking, they are not likely to be hunting because if they were hunting, they would be quiet.” 
 
 - Wiser with age - 
 
 Elephant groups with older matriarchs in their midst did best at assessing the threat from different speakers, further bolstering the presumed role of learning in the animals’ behavior. 
 
 The elephants also did not act the same way as they did when recordings of lions were played, as was shown in a previous study. 
 
 In those scenarios, they bunched together so that juveniles — those most at risk from a lion attack — were in the center, and moved toward the sounds as if to scare the lion away. 
 
 When it comes to recognizing people, elephants may not be alone in this ability. Other research has suggested that wild bottlenose dolphins in Brazil have become so familiar with humans that they engage in cooperative hunting with artisanal fisherman. 
 
 Great apes, crows and even prairie dogs have also been shown to differentiate between humans on some level. 
 
 A separate study published last month in the journal PLoS ONE showed elephants even have specific alarm calls for when humans are near, suggesting the relationship between people and elephants has reached a troubling point and that conservation efforts are more important than ever. 
 
 “We have become a formal enemy of the elephants,” said Lori Marino, an expert on animal intelligence at Emory University. 
 
 “They can not only make some distinctions between us, but we are now on their list of species to watch out for.” 
 
 [Image via Agence France-Presse] ||||| WASHINGTON (AP) — Dr. Seuss had it right: Horton really does hear a Who. Wild elephants can distinguish between human languages, and they can tell whether a voice comes from a man, woman or boy, a new study says. 
 
 This handout photo provided by the University of Sussex, taken in April 2011, shows a wild elephant in Amboseli National Park in Kenya reacting to sound played by scientists in experiments that show they... (Associated Press) 
 
 That's what researchers found when they played recordings of people for elephants in Kenya. Scientists say this is an advanced thinking skill that other animals haven't shown. It lets elephants figure out who is a threat and who isn't. 
 
 The result shows that while humans are studying elephants, the clever animals are also studying people and drawing on their famed powers of memory, said study author Karen McComb. 
 
 "Basically they have developed this very rich knowledge of the humans that they share their habitat with," said McComb , a professor of animal behavior and cognition at the University of Sussex in England. 
 
 "Memory is key. They must build up that knowledge somehow." 
 
 The study was released Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 
 
 It's close but not quite like the Dr. Seuss book, where the empathetic elephant Horton hears something that others can't hear. 
 
 McComb and colleagues went to Amboseli National Park in Kenya, where hundreds of wild elephants live among humans, sometimes coming in conflict over scarce water. The scientists used voice recordings of Maasai men, who on occasion kill elephants in confrontations over grazing for cattle, and Kamba men, who are less of a threat to the elephants. The recordings contained the same phrase in two different languages: "Look over there. A group of elephants is coming." 
 
 By about a two-to-one margin, the elephants reacted defensively — retreating and gathering in a bunch — more to the Maasai language recording because it was associated with the more threatening human tribe, said study co-author Graeme Shannon of Colorado State University. 
 
 "They are making such a fine-level discrimination using human language skills," Shannon said. "They're able to acquire quite detailed knowledge. The only way of doing this is with an exceptionally large brain." 
 
 They repeated the experiment with recordings of Maasai men and women. Since women almost never spear elephants, the animals reacted less to the women's voices. The same thing happened when they substituted young boys' voices. 
 
 "Making this kind of fine distinctions in human voice patterns is quite remarkable," said Emory University animal cognition expert Frans de Waal, who was not part of the study. 
 
 While it shows quite a bit about elephant intelligence and adaptability, it also indicates a problem, said biologist Josh Plotnik, founder of Think Elephants International, a research and advocacy group. 
 
 "This is both fascinating in that it supports evidence we already have that these animals are behaviorally quite flexible, but also sad because it suggests that the conflict between humans and elephants is growing," Plotnik, who was not part of the study, wrote in an email. 
 
 In yet another experiment McComb and Shannon altered female and male voices, making female voices sound male by lowering their tone and resonance, and males sound female by raising their pitches. Those kinds of changes fool most humans, but the clever elephants weren't tricked, McComb said. They still moved away from the altered male voices and not the altered female voices. 
 
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 Journal: http://www.pnas.org 
 
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 Seth Borenstein can be followed at http://twitter.com/borenbears. ||||| Elephants have five times more olfactory receptors than humans and the most of any animal characterized to date, according to a new study. (Courtesy of Eric Green) 
 
 Elephant noses might be the most discerning mammalian sniffers on the planet. According to a new study published Tuesday in Genome Research, African elephants may best humans, mice and even dogs on the measure of olfactory receptor genes. 
 
 But that doesn’t mean elephants should replace canines on a police squad. While the number of active olfactory genes in elephants is quite impressive — 2,000, which is twice the number found in dogs and five times the number found in humans — scientists say there isn’t a clear connection between having more genes and being a better smeller in every way. It’s not all about the number of olfactory receptor genes but also how an animal uses them. 
 
 “We don’t really know how the number of olfactory receptor genes relates to olfactory ability,” said study author Yoshihito Niimura, a researcher at the University of Tokyo’s department of applied biological chemistry. “For example, dogs are known for their keen sense of smell — but we actually already knew that their number of genes was much smaller than mice, who we don’t see with that same ability.” Dogs, Niimura said, have very sensitive noses but perhaps less discerning ones. 
 
 “Dogs are very good at smelling particular odors,” he said, “like the smell of humans. They can detect those odor molecules even at very low concentrations,” which is why they can follow the trail of a scent they pick up. “In that sense,” he said, “a dog has a sense of smell that’s something like a million times better than a human’s,” and certainly better than an elephant’s as well. 
 
 The advantage for elephants, Niimura said, most likely lies in a broader range of identifiable smells. Previous studies have indicated that Asian elephants are able to distinguish between very similar odor molecules — ones that humans and other primates find impossible to separate. 
 
 Indian elephant Rhena drinks from a water hose at the zoo in Krefeld, Germany. (Roland Weihrauch/European Pressphoto Agency) 
 
 This is useful to the creatures in several ways: Elephants can recognize other elephants by the smell of their urine, and research suggests that some elephants also use pheromones — smelly chemical signals that animals use both to communicate with and to induce involuntary reactions, like arousal, in other members of their species. 
 
 It’s not surprising that elephants have become so reliant on olfaction, Niimura said. They use their trunks to interact with the world. “Imagine having a nose on the palm of your hand,” he said. “Every time you touch something, you smell it.” So whether foraging for food or greeting a friend, elephants put their nose to the test. And African elephants use their sharp sense of smell to deal with humans, too. 
 
 “In Kenya, anecdotally, everyone knows that wild elephants are able to distinguish one tribe from another,” Niimura said. A 2007 Current Biology study examined this phenomenon: Elephants were found to react aggressively to both the colors and smells of the Maasai tribe, which spears elephants to show courage and strength. Signs of the Kamba tribe, which doesn’t hunt elephants, didn’t seem to bother them. “There’s certainly an indication,” Niimura said, “that we’re seeing their ability to distinguish odors there.” 
 
 So the cliche of the never-forgetful elephant may have something to do with their killer olfaction, which could help them distinguish places and people from one another. “But I must make a point of saying,” Niimura said, “that elephants are very intelligent.” Not all credit can be given to a good nose, but elephants also seem adept at turning those smells into useful knowledge.
– Speak the wrong language in front of an African elephant, and she may not like you much. In a study at a Kenyan national park, researchers played recordings of different languages and voices for 47 elephant family groups, comprising hundreds of animals. The recordings included the voices of Maasai men, whose cattle-herding can cause run-ins with elephants. Kamba men, on the other hand, are often farmers or national park workers and present little danger to elephants, AFP reports via Raw Story. While the languages recorded were different, the spoken phrase was the same: "Look, look over there—a group of elephants is coming." When the elephants heard Maasai men, they prepared to protect themselves, sniffing around and moving together. But the voices of Kamba men didn't prompt much worry. "They are making such a fine-level discrimination using human language skills," a study author tells the AP. "They're able to acquire quite detailed knowledge." The elephants also appeared to be able to distinguish between men and women: Maasai women's voices didn't set off major alarm bells, nor did Maasai boys'. The findings come as humans and elephants overlap more often in the park, leading to occasional clashes, Discover notes. Indeed, the study is "sad because it suggests that the conflict between humans and elephants is growing," says an expert.