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Infrasonic Communication in Elephants
In 1986, Oregon Zoo staff members, working with Katharine B. Payne of Cornell University, made one of the most important advances in elephant research. They discovered the use of infrasonic communication in elephant herds. Payne, a bioacoustics expert, had suspected that elephants spoke to each other in a manner not detectable by humans. She chose to conduct her research on the world-famous elephants at the Oregon Zoo.
During her stay at the zoo, Payne worked with 10 Asian elephants. While observing three elephant mothers and their calves, she felt a rumbling and throbbing in the air in addition to the trumpets and roars the elephants made. The rumbling reminded Payne of a deep organ pipe she’d stood near as a child singing in her church choir. She remembered feeling the entire chapel throb when the organist played the bass lines of certain hymns, and she believed the same phenomenon to be at work with the elephants at the Oregon Zoo. After recording these rumblings and playing them back at a higher frequency, Payne discovered that the elephants were in fact communicating with each other using infrasound — low-frequency sounds outside the human range of hearing.
From this research at the Oregon Zoo, Payne concluded that elephants use these low-frequency calls to coordinate social behavior and movements. Until this discovery, infrasound had not been considered to play a role in the lives of animals.
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