Novel ways elephants communicate

  

photo courtesy of  Greg George

It is believed that elephants use low frequency signals transmitted through the ground as a means of communication.  A current theory is that elephants are able to sense the vibrations through pressure-sensitive nerve endings, Pacinian corpuscles, in their feet and —Meissner’s corpuscles that detect infrasonic vibrations - in the tip of their trunks.

 Scientists Katy Payne, Joyce Poole and their colleagues discovered that elephants emit a variety of infrasounds—calls too low in pitch to be heard by most humans. In 1989, Payne and her colleagues conducted a landmark experiment at a waterhole in Etosha demonstrating that these powerful infrasonic rumbles contain specific messages that can be heard and understood by other elephants more than 2 miles away.

This article contains information on the progression of seismic communication research in elephants and evidence supporting the idea that elephants use low frequency signals to communicate a variety of information from predator warnings to reproductive cues.

Filed under Animal Facts, New Research |