( till like statues for several seconds. ...)Scientists journey to southern Africa to unravel the secret world of elephant communication

Synchronized freezing is a common behavior in the wild, even among large herds of 20 or more. Remaining motionless seems to enable elephants to focus their keen senses of smell and hearing on unfamiliar noises and odors in the air. But O'Connell-Rodwell believes they could be responding to tactile sensations as well.

"Bulls often lay their trunk on the ground when freezing," she observes. "We think they may be using it as a tool to detect vibrations in the earth."

Good vibrations

Elephants don't just feel the vibes, O'Connell-Rodwell says, they also transmit vibrational signals through the ground--long-distance seismic messages that could play a crucial role in their survival and reproductive success. "Perhaps they're sending out signals to potential mates far away," she says. "Or maybe they can tell if a predator is in the vicinity by picking up seismic cues from a distressed herd."

These underground messages may not be deliberate transmissions, but rather the byproducts of intense low-frequency sounds produced when elephants run, charge and vocalize. In the mid-1980s, 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.

Several years later, environmental scientist David Larom and his co-workers proposed that, under ideal atmospheric conditions, low-frequency calls could travel 6 miles or more through the air. Now in private industry, Larom has long been intrigued by O'Connell-Rodwell's work.

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Source:Stanford University