How Do Elephants Communicate? Rumbles, Trumpets and Touch

What sounds do elephants make?

Elephants have a large vocal repertoire. The best known is the trumpet, a loud blast made by forcing air through the trunk. It signals strong excitement, such as alarm, aggression or the joy of a reunion. Elephants also roar and bellow when fighting or in pain, and calves squeal when they are distressed.

Most elephant conversation, though, is made of rumbles. These are produced in the elephant’s enormous larynx, the largest of any land mammal, and can be heard by people as a low, purring growl. Elephants use dozens of rumble variations for different purposes: greetings, contact calls between separated family members, calls from the matriarch to signal that it is time to move, and the pulsing “musth rumble” of a bull in breeding condition.

How far can elephant rumbles travel?

Much of the energy in a rumble lies in infrasound, below about 20 Hz, which is too low for people to hear. In African elephants, these rumbles fall roughly between 15 and 35 Hz and can be very loud, over 100 decibels at close range. Low-frequency sound travels much farther than high-pitched sound because it is less absorbed by air and vegetation.

Under good conditions, elephants can probably hear each other several kilometers away, and estimates for ideal calm evenings reach about 10 km (6 mi). This lets families that have split up while feeding stay in touch, and helps females in heat and bulls in musth find one another across the savanna.

Can elephants communicate through the ground?

Yes, it appears so. When an elephant rumbles, stomps or runs, part of the energy travels through the ground as vibrations. Experiments have shown that elephants can detect and respond to these seismic signals, including played-back alarm calls. Models suggest that such vibrations could travel farther than airborne sound, possibly over 10 km, although how far elephants actually detect them in the wild is still being studied.

Elephants seem to pick up these vibrations through sensitive nerve endings in their feet and through the bones of their legs, which carry the vibrations to the inner ear. When listening this way, an elephant may lean forward, put more weight on its front feet and stand perfectly still.

How do elephants use touch and smell?

Touch is constant in elephant families. Elephants greet each other by stroking or entwining trunks, and a lower-ranking African bush elephant may place its trunk tip in a dominant animal’s mouth. Mothers touch, nudge and guide their calves with their trunks and feet, while older elephants discipline youngsters with a trunk slap or a shove. Our article How do elephants use their trunks? explains this remarkable organ in more detail.

Smell carries a lot of information. Elephants have an excellent sense of smell and investigate urine, dung and secretions to learn who has passed by. Bulls in musth release a strong-smelling fluid from glands on the sides of their heads. Females signal that they are ready to mate with chemicals in their urine, which bulls test by touching it with their trunks and transferring the scent to a special organ in the roof of the mouth.

What does elephant body language mean?

Elephants also talk with their bodies. An elephant trying to look threatening raises its head, spreads its ears wide and may shake its head or kick up dust; most of these displays are bluffs. A submissive elephant lowers its head and holds its ears flat. Ears are especially important in these signals, as explained in Why do elephants have big ears?

Do elephants call each other by name?

A study published in 2024 in Nature Ecology & Evolution analyzed hundreds of rumbles recorded from wild African bush elephants in Amboseli and Samburu in Kenya. Using machine learning, the researchers found that rumbles aimed at a particular elephant contained features specific to that receiver, much like a name. In playback experiments, elephants responded more strongly, by calling back or approaching, to recordings of calls originally addressed to them than to calls addressed to others.

Unlike the “signature whistles” of dolphins, which imitate the receiver’s own call, these elephant names appear to be arbitrary, as human names are. The finding suggests that elephant communication is more complex than once thought, though scientists are still working out how the names are formed and learned.

Can elephants imitate sounds?

Some can. Elephants are among the few mammals known to learn new sounds by imitation. An Asian elephant named Koshik at a zoo in South Korea learned to imitate several Korean words by putting his trunk in his mouth to shape the sound, and an African elephant in Kenya was recorded imitating the sound of passing trucks.