Here’s a remarkable story this morning from the Boston Globe about elephants and how they communicate.
The loud snouts and big ears are obvious, of course. But Stanford researcher Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell reports that elephants also use their feet to send and receive messages over phenomenal distances. “They are talking through the ground,” she says.
From the story:
“We haven’t been able to measure how far the vibrations can be understood, but we think the seismic messages are travelling farther than the airborne waves,” O’Connell-Rodwell said, estimating that 12 or 13 miles might be a realistic range, but that the seismic waves – unlike air sound, which quickly dissipates – theoretically “have no outer limit.” Part of this summer’s research will involve trying to determine how far elephants can actually “hear” through the ground – it could be a much larger distance, she said.
In O’Connell-Rodwell’s latest study, scheduled to be published next month, the elephant specialist reports these seismic signals are so sophisticated that elephants can distinguish whether the messaging comes from trusted fellow herd members or strangers – a sort of “caller ID of the wild,” according to O’Connell-Rodwell. The next step in her research is to figure out how the elephants make these distinctions.
I’d ask one. You just might get an answer.
