Elephants Use Low-Frequency Sounds to Communicate

The Elephant Listening Project (ELP) uses acoustic monitoring to evaluate the abundance and health of elephants living in the dense African forest.

Bioacoustics Research Program (http://www.birds.cornell.edu/brp/research/animal-communication-research )

Researchers at Cornell University working on the Elephant Listening Project are studying the acoustical patterns of the Asian, the African savannah, and African forest elephant. All three species of elephant make calls at low-frequency that are lower than human’s ability to hear (20 Hz). This type of infrasound, however, is very powerful and breaks down very little over long distances. This allows elephants to remain in communication with each other over great expanses of forest or savannah. Elephants within a family can remain in contact with one another up to 4 kilometers apart.
Interestingly, the diversity of elephant calls is apparently similar between all three species of elephant. This type of familiar low-frequency communication allows elephants to identify and coordinate with one another while foraging. Based upon the behavioral context, researchers have revealed multiple call types and that the majority of these calls are made by females. Calls are used to coordinate a larger group of individuals or for reproduction. These calls are differentiated by recurring ‘fission’ and ‘fusion’ of related individuals structured around adult females in the group. Using this communication is critical to maintaining the family as it moves throughout a forest or savannah.
This is an example of the different types of rumbly sounds made by forest elephants. This was recorded at the Dzanga clearing in the Central African Republic by the ELP team. The orange line shows the limit of human hearing. Elephants can produce sounds that are both audible and non-audible to humans.
The researchers mainly focused on acoustical data for their study, but made note that it is also important to recognize that elephants also greatly use smell. Pheromones are an important part of elephant particularly communication for mating. However the long distance communication allows for elephants to pair up.
The life of an elephant is long lived and they maintain many complex lasting relationships. Their acoustical communication patterns are similarly intricate. We are still at the forefront of understanding this system but researchers believe information including emotive state, physical characteristics, intention, and perhaps even abstract concepts are communicated using these deep low-frequency sounds.

Posted by "Nicole Breivogel" (1)

Saturday October 3rd, 2009

According to the study by Cornell University, the task of studying the low frequency communication of elephants in a dense forest environment seems daunting and would likely be full of difficulties. The variation in the habitat in that type of area wold make it difficult to conduct research.

These low frequencies are believed to be used because of the types of environments that forest and savanna elephants live in. Females are able to distinguish one another from their calls.

Eephants are also very olfactory animals - they use their sense of smell to decode an entirely separate, but overlapping, language based on pheromones. Pheromones are probably particularly important when elephants are communicating about their readiness for mating. But long distance communication using infrasound likely enables male and female elephants to come close enough together to find one another and allow the shorter-distance chemical language of pheromones to come into play.