Elephant rumble choruses converge during social exchange

A Scientific Reports study analyzed 902 low-frequency rumble recordings from 84 wild African savannah elephants across 39 families in Kenya's Amboseli National Park, collected between 1986 and 2022. About 60% of rumbles occurred in overlapping choruses involving two or more elephants. Machine learning could predict six social contexts from acoustic features, and successive exchanges converged during contact, greeting and cadenced coordination. The findings support a group-signaling function, but the work relies on observational recordings and statistical models; it did not use playback experiments to prove how elephants interpret every change.