( e air is one thing but what if the ele...)Scientists journey to southern Africa to unravel the secret world of elephant communication

To find out, the research team devised an experiment using an electronic shaker that converts acoustic sounds into vibrations. The device was brought to Mushara in 2002 and buried near the waterhole. Using long wires, the researchers connected the shaker to a tape deck installed in the upper level of the observation tower 100 yards away.

Every time a herd showed up at the waterhole, O'Connell-Rodwell would pop a tape of the '94 warning call into the deck, and the underground shaker would play it back as a seismic vibration. To make sure the elephants were feeling the calls and not hearing them, microphones were installed above ground so researchers could monitor all low frequency sounds in the air. "The results of our 2002 study showed us that elephants do indeed detect warning calls played through the ground," O'Connell-Rodwell observes. "We expected them to clump up into tight groups and leave the area, and that's in fact what they did. But since we only played back one type of call, we can't really say whether they were interpreting it correctly. Maybe they thought it was a vehicle or something strange instead of a predator warning."

(To hear actual elephant vocalizations, visit the website http://www.elephantvoices.org/index.php?topic=resources.)

Mushara 2004

The 2004 Mushara experiment was designed to solve that problem by using three different recordings--the '94 warning call from Mushara; an anti-predator call recorded by scientist Joyce Poole in Kenya; and an artificial warble tone. A shaker was once again buried near the waterhole and wired to a tape deck in the tower. All three sounds were randomly played through the shaker at different times to see if the elephants could recognize them as distinct vibrations. "We wanted to determine if they can discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar calls that are played back as seismic s
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Source:Stanford University