Researchers learn elephants' secret language
Read the Earth & Sky interview with Katy Payne, founder of the Elephant Listening Project. (Photo courtesy of Melissa Groo).
Male elephants find fertile females, and elephants families stay together, via “conversations” too low in frequency to be heard by the human ear.
Since 1999, researchers with the Elephant Listening Project have used an acoustic monitoring system to record elephant sounds in the African rainforest.
They’ve learned that elephants use infrasonic calls – calls too low in frequency to be heard by the human ear – for long–distance communication. Infrasound can travel farther than higher pitched sound. Elephant families separated by several kilometers use them to keep track of each other. Male elephants find fertile females by using these low frequency sounds.
Elephant populations in Africa are decreasing due to encroaching human civilization. But, even as we humans have become stewards to the elephants, it’s hard to know exactly how many elephants are left. Elephants in the dense forests of Africa are difficult to count. Sightings are rare. The Elephant Listening Project is developing a system that uses the elephants’ calls to determine the size and health of the herds. At least one such study was used to locate hotspots of elephant activity.
And it’s not just the elephants’ sounds that get monitored. The recorders also pick up human sounds – gunshots, chainsaws, and vehicle noise – which help to identify potential threats to forest elephant populations.
Our thanks to:
Katy Payne
Elephant Listening Project
Bioacoustics Research Program
Ithaca, NY
Read Silent Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants by Elephant Listening Project scientist Katy Payne.
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I read on livescience.com :
Scientists discovered that wild gibbons in Thailand have crafted unique songs as alarm calls to other gibbons, a discovery that might shed light on the evolution of spoken language.
Do you believe that animals really have their own language?
dr Doolittle is not that crazy after all LOL
I can’t imagine how lions could coordinate a hunt, or mother dogs could keep track of their puppies, or whales could find each other across miles of ocean, or bees could organize the hive WITHOUT language. Of course, animals may not be saying the same things that we say to each other.