Can you hear the rumble in the jungle? Elephants can and they don't like it

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2021-06-30 09:01

International

Image by kolibri5 from Pixabay

African elephants have learnt to avoid noises and vibrations in the earth associated with human disturbance according to international researchers, who played human-made noises to wild elephants. The team found that the elephants moved further away in response to human-made, rather than elephant-generated, noises. They say this suggests that elephants are able to associate human-generated noise with a potential risk that they seek to avoid, and may have implications for elephants near expanding construction works or roads.

Media release

From: The Royal Society

Noise matters: Elephants show risk-avoidance behaviour in response to human-generated seismic cues

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Elephants have an enigmatic sense – the ability to communicate via ground-based or seismic vibrations. Here we show that seismic noise is an important cue for elephants – playing back human-generated seismic noise led to retreat responses in wild elephants, which shows they associate it with risk. This is important for understanding how humans might impact elephants, particularly the seismic noise that is associated with infrastructure development (including roads, railways etc).

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Journal/
conference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: University of Oxford, UK

Funder: B.M. thanks the British Ecological Society (grant no. LRB18/ 1010), the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, St Anne’s College, Oxford and the Royal Society (grant no. URF/R1/191033) for funding.

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