Do elephants communicate from group to group? What purposes would inter-group communication serve?
Fragments of a family or bond group often split up for hours, days or weeks or may travel along the same routes, maintaining distances of several kilometers between them. In such instances elephants use contact calls to keep in touch with one another and maintain these coordinated movements. Sexually active males may listen in for the sounds of large groups of females or for the calls of receptive females in their search for mates. Other elephants may use long distance communication to avoid coming in contact with one another. For example, subordinate families may wish to avoid coming into contact with a higher ranking family if they are not in their home area, and a realtively small musth male may wish to avoid a confrontation with a higher-ranking musth males. In these cases, elephants wouldn’t even have to directly address one another since listening in to the calls produced by neighbouring individuals and groups they could determine the location, identity and state of the other ele
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