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Elephants hear with their feet
07/06/2007 12:17 - (SA)
Paris - Elephants use their feet to "hear" calls from other herds but react most if the calls come from elephants they know, New Scientist reports.
Elephants are already known for their ability to emit low-frequency sounds to communicate with herds up to several kilometres away.
Researchers led by Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell of Stanford University Medical Centre in California also suspected that these rumblings generate seismic waves that travel through the ground, enabling elephants to pick up the signals through their surprisingly sensitive feet.
Her team recorded alarm calls in Namibia and Kenya made by elephants when lions were lurking.
They then played just the seismic portion of the sound through the ground to herds at watering holes in Namibia.
The elephants "reacted dramatically, first freezing and then clumping in tight groups, with babies in the middle", the British weekly reports in next Saturday's issue.
But the farther the elephants lived from the herd which made the call, the less they reacted.
What was especially curious was that the Namibian elephants responded least to alarm calls from herds in Kenya, apparently because these animals were unfamiliar to them.
The study is to be published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, New Scientist says.
- AFP
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