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Jan. 29: The language of elephants is being interpreted by zoologists in a project that could eventually create the first “audio dictionary” of animal sounds.
Scientists from Cornell University in New York state are recording trumpeting and rumbling exchanges, some pitched so low they cannot be heard by the human ear.
They believe their work in Africa has identified not only linguistic differences between bush and forest elephants but regional differences akin to accents in humans. This may help explain why the two subspecies so rarely mate — neither can be quite sure what the other is talking about.
Andrea Turkalo, one of the scientists, said some of the most terrifying sounds elephants make are actually cheery greetings.
“When the mothers get together, they start talking over each other in excitement,” said Turkalo, who first went to the Central African Republic 20 years ago to record elephant sounds at Dzanga, a watering hole in the rainforest.
Speaking on 60Minutes last week, Turkalo said she could recognise hundreds of elephants by their conversational styles. Some are aggressive, some nervous and others playful. The males use a deep rumble to find mates.
Turkalo says these “infrasounds” are so deep they need to be played back at high speed to be made sense of. On the African plains they can be heard three miles away.
Turkalo, 59, emailed her recordings back to her boss Katharine Payne, 74, who founded the elephant listening project at Cornell.
Payne was curious about how such huge creatures avoid getting in each other’s way as they eat a quarter of a tonne of leaves a day. “A combination of subtle face-to-face interchanges, exchanging more information than you might think, and a long-distance communications system is the answer,” she said.
Elephant mothers are protective of their young: when a calf became separated from its family and started calling out, Turkalo’s microphones recorded infrasonic notes known to biologists as “reassurance rumbles” as seven females thundered to the baby’s side.
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