Feeling the beat through the elephants feet

Iconic and intelligent creatures, elephants continue to fascinate curious onlookers and scientists alike. Now, a new Oxford University collaboration with Save The Elephants, has shown that elephant behaviour can be determined in a new way: through the vibrations they create. The findings of the study, published in the journal Current Biology, offer a new way to detect elephants and discern their behaviour without having them in sight. It also has the potential to provide real-time information on elephant distress and poaching threats in remote locations. Researchers from the University's Department of Zoology and Earth Sciences worked to-gether with Save The Elephants to develop an innovative way of classifying elephant behav-iours by monitoring the tremors that their movements send through the ground. To capture the information - The team also performed an active but complementary experiment wielding a sledge ham-mer against the ground, which allowed them to generate and measure a controlled vibration, and recorded the sound of cars, people hopping up and down, planes flying overhead and a variety of other noises that contributed to the signals scientists might pick up when recording elephants. Due to their large size, it is perhaps unsurprising that elephants generate vibrations through their normal movements.