The Guardian

London:

Researchers have identified an elephant in Kenya that makes traffic noises. In quiet moments after dark, Mlaika the semi-captive orphan astonished experts by making the sound of a distant truck revving up. In formal terms, Joyce Poole of the Amboseli elephant research project in Tsavo national park and colleagues report in the magazine Nature today, Mlaika is evidence that vocal learning in response to auditory experience has evolved in elephants. Mlaika, a 10-year-old adolescent, roams freely by day, but shares a pen with other orphans at night. When Dr Poole realised that Mlaika’s sounds were just like one of the trucks that thundered along the Nairobi-Mombasa highway, a mile or two distant, she felt nobody would believe her. So she got in touch with Peter Tyack, an expert in marine mammal noises at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. They agreed that Mlaika made a convincing imitation of a heavy lorry. “I was sometimes unable to distinguish between the distant trucks and Mlaika’s calling. I had to take my earphones off to tell what was a nearby elephant and what was a distant truck,” Dr Poole said.