BEIJING, Mar. 16 -- 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.

    Joyce Poole of the Amboseli elephant research project in Tsavo national park and colleagues report in the latest edition of the magazine Nature, Mlaika provides evidence that vocal learning in response to auditory experience has evolved in elephants.

    It would seem that the world's largest land animal is as nimble as parrots, starlings, bats, whales and dolphins when it comes to vocal imitation. Parrots have learned to curse in human, gorillas to deploy American sign language and now an elephant has articulated a lorry.

    Mlaika, a 10-year-old adolescent, roams freely by day, but shares a pen with other orphans at night.

    When Doctor Poole realized 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.

    Doctor Poole said. "This is what first made me wonder whether she could possibly be imitating the truck sounds. Later, when I played the sounds to people who did not know it was an elephant calling, I asked people what they thought it was. Their answer was usually 'a truck'." Mlaika talks to other elephants and her keepers like a normal elephant.

    The unexpected sound of distant traffic from inside a stockade on the savannah was the first evidence that something unexpected had evolved in an elephant community. Then colleagues in Europe chimed in with evidence that a 23-year-old African elephant had learned the entirely foreign chirping noises of two female Asian elephants during 18 years in Basel zoo.

    This was confirmation of vocal learning as a way to maintain social relationships. To get along, an elephant can learn a new way of talking. "I do not believe that Mlaika thought she was talking to anyone in this case," Doctor Poole said. "Certainly none of the other elephants in the stockade paid any attention to her."

    "I think Mlaika made the truck-like sounds to relieve the boredom of being locked up at night. In other words, she did it for her own entertainment."

    (Source: China Daily)