Biology:Elephant Listening Project

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The Elephant Listening Project is a research group in the Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Founded in 1999 by Katy Payne, the project focuses on the biology and conservation of the African forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis), a species inhabiting the rainforests of central and west Africa.

Origins

The concept behind the Elephant Listening Project began to form in 1984 when Katy Payne was observing Asian elephants in the Portland Zoo and began to suspect that elephants communicate using infrasonic frequencies, frequencies below what humans can hear. Carl Hopkins and Bob Capranica, acoustic biologists at Cornell University, encouraged Payne to return to Portland with specialized recording equipment to gather additional data. After four months in Portland with colleagues William Langbauer and Elizabeth Thomas, she had the evidence she needed.[1] Payne was aware of observations of families of African savannah elephants (Loxodonta africana) apparently coordinating their movements even when separated by several kilometers.[2][3] Payne's insight was that perhaps the infrasonic frequencies of elephant calls could be heard even kilometers away and so used to coordinate movements and behavioral interactions. Through a series of field experiments with numerous collaborators, Payne was able to demonstrate that this was in fact the case.[4][5][6] In 1999, Payne published her elephant discoveries in her book, Silent Thunder.[7]

Late in the 1990s, considerable conservation concern was growing about the poorly known forest elephant, at the time considered a subspecies of the savannah elephant. Another of Payne's insights was that these difficult-to-observe animals might be studied by listening to their low-frequency vocalizations, even where they could not be seen. The result was the founding of the Elephant Listening Project at the Laboratory of Ornithology in 1999.

Applying the Discovery

From the beginning, the Elephant Listening Project collaborated closely with Andrea Turkalo, the world expert on forest elephant social biology. Her work at the Dzanga Bai (a forest clearing) in the Central African Republic, which began in 1990 and continued until 2017, forms the foundation of our knowledge of forest elephant demography.[8][9] In 2000, Payne and colleagues began the first studies of acoustic communication in forest elephants, culminating in several key publications that remain the foundation of the landscape-scale acoustic monitoring conducted by the Elephant Listening Project today.[10][11]

Current Focus

In 2005, Katy Payne retired and Peter Wrege took over the project. With the continued devastating decline of forest elephant populations due to poaching and human population growth, Wrege turned the focus of the Elephant Listening Project to using acoustic tools for applied conservation.[12][13][14][15] Primary among these has been implementing landscape-scale passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) projects to discover the details of how forest elephants use different habitats, where they engage in social interactions within the forest, and how they respond to human intrusion. The largest of these studies is in the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park in northern Republic of Congo, monitoring 1250 km2 of rainforest. More than one million hours of forest sounds have been recorded, including elephant rumbles and poacher's gunshots. The recordings from this ongoing study have been made publicly available in the hope that other conservationists will utilize this unique resource.

Beginning in 2020, the Elephant Listening Project, in partnership with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) began managing elephant research at the Dzanga Bai in the Central African Republic. The focus of this effort is to build on the unparalleled historical knowledge of individually-recognized elephants gathered by Andrea Turkalo. Turkalo identified more than 4,000 individual elephants and tracked their family relationships, social behavior, history of visits to the clearing, and reproduction, often from birth to adulthood. These data provide the most complete source of material available for understanding forest elephant demography and behavior.[16][17][18]

References

  1. ↑ Payne, Katy (1986). "Infrasonic calls of the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus)". Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 18 (4): 297–301. doi:10.1007/bf00300007. 
  2. ↑ Martin, R. B. (1978). "Aspects of elephant social organization". Rhodesia Science News 12: 184–187. 
  3. ↑ Poole, J. H. (1987). "Rutting behavior in African elephants: the phenomenon of musth". Behaviour 102 (3–4): 283–316. doi:10.1163/156853986X00171. 
  4. ↑ Poole, J. H.; Payne, K.; Langbauer, W. R.; Moss, C. J. (1988). "The social contexts of some very low-frequency calls of African elephants". Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 22 (6): 385–392. doi:10.1007/BF00294975. 
  5. ↑ Langbauer, W. R.; Payne, K. B.; Charif, R. A.; Rapaport, L.; Osborn, F. (1991). "African elephants respond to distant playbacks of low-frequency conspecific calls". Journal of Experimental Biology 157: 35–46. 
  6. ↑ Larom, D.; Garstang, M.; Payne, K.; Raspet, R.; Lindeque, M. (1997). "The influence of surface atmospheric conditions on the range and area reached by animal vocalizations". Journal of Experimental Biology 200 (3): 421–431. PMID 9057305. 
  7. ↑ Payne, Katy (1998). Silent Thunder. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-684-80108-6. 
  8. ↑ Turkalo, A. K.; Fay, J. M. (1995). "Studying forest elephants by direct observation: preliminary results from the Dzanga clearing, Central African Republic". Pachyderm 20: 45–54. 
  9. ↑ Turkalo, A. K.; Wrege, P. H.; Wittemeyer, G. (2013). "Long-term monitoring of Dzanga Bai forest elephants: forest clearing use patterns". PLOS ONE 8 (12): e85154. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2028.2009.01161.x. PMID 24386460. 
  10. ↑ Thompson, M.; Schwager, S. J.; Payne, K. B. (2009). "Heard but not seen: an acoustic survey of the African forest elephant population at Kakum Conservation Area, Ghana". African Journal of Ecology 48 (1): 224–231. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2028.2009.01106.x. 
  11. ↑ Thompson, M.; Schwager, S. J.; Payne, K. B.; Turkalo, A. K. (2009). "Acoustic estimation of wildlife abundance: methodology for vocal mammals in forested habitat". African Journal of Ecology 48: 654–661. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2028.2009.01161.x. 
  12. ↑ Wrege, P. H.; Rowland, E. D.; Thompson, B. G.; Batruch, N. (2010). "Use of acoustic tools to reveal otherwise cryptic responses of forest elephants to oil exploration". Conservation Biology 24 (6): 1578–85. doi:10.1111/j.1523-1739.2010.01559.x. PMID 20666800. 
  13. ↑ Wrege, P. H.; Rowland, E. D.; Keen, S.; Shiu, Y. (2017). "Acoustic monitoring for conservation in tropical forests: examples from forest elephants". Methods in Ecology and Evolution 8 (10): 1292–1301. doi:10.1111/2041-210x.12730. 
  14. ↑ Astaras, C.; Linder, J. M.; Wrege, P. H.; Orume, R. D.; Johnson, P. J.; Macdonald, D. W. (2020). "Boots on the ground: the role of passive acoustic monitoring in evaluating anti-poaching patrols". Environmental Conservation 47 (3): 213–216. doi:10.1017/S0376892920000193. 
  15. ↑ Astaras, C.; Linder, J. M.; Wrege, P. H.; Orume, R. D.; Macdonald, D. (2017). "Passive acoustic monitoring as a law enforcement monitoring tool for Afrotropical rainforests". Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 15 (5): 233–234. doi:10.1002/fee.1495. 
  16. ↑ Goldenberg, S. Z.; Turkalo, A. K.; Wrege, P. H.; Hedwig, D.; Wittemyer, G. (2020). "Entry and aggregation at a Central African bai reveal social patterns in the elusive forest elephant Loxodonta cyclotis". Animal Behaviour 171: 77–85. doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2020.11.008. 
  17. ↑ Turkalo, A. K.; Wrege, P. H.; Wittemyer, G. (2018). "Demography of a forest elephant population". PLOS ONE 13 (2): e0192777. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0192777. PMID 29447207. Bibcode: 2018PLoSO..1392777T. 
  18. ↑ Turkalo, A. K.; Wrege, P. H.; Wittemyer, G. (2017). "Slow intrinsic growth rate in forest elephants indicates recovery from poaching will require decades". Journal of Applied Ecology 54 (1): 153–159. doi:10.1111/1365-2664.12764. 




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