Old friends

Two solitary elderly male elephants approached each other from opposite directions.

This short video shows what happened; it is briefly silent at the start, but make sure your sound is on high:

The trunk greeting, in which they smell each others’ mouths, is common. Our guide said they were likely to be old friends reuniting, and would now hang out together for a while. Although he suggested that the rumbling sounds you hear are deliberate tummy rumbles/burps, the scientific literature disagrees, and says they are laryngeal in origin (yellow below), mediated via very large resonating cavities including the trunk, in light blue below (from Beeck et al 2022).

Stoeger et al 2012 show that in bonding situations, when the animals are close to each other like the two we watched, the rumbles are emitted orally, not nasally.

As for me, I’m off to lunch with old friends from high school. In this bonding context, any nasal snorting sounds will be caused by laughter.