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Katy Payne is a Research Associate in the
Bioacoustics Research Program of Cornell University's Laboratory
of Ornithology. She started her studies of animal communication
with a fifteen-year study of the constantly changing songs of
humpback whales -- a fascinating example of cultural evolution.
Then in 1984, Payne and two associates discovered that elephants
make infrasonic calls that lie below the range of human hearing
and travel exceptionally well. Since then she and a shifting array
of associates have focused on long-distance communication in African
elephants in Kenya, Namibia, and Zimbabwe. Their studies show
that elephants' powerful low-frequency calls function in mate
attraction and probably in family coordination over distances
whose outer limits vary between four and ten kilometers and are
highly dependent on atmospheric conditions.
In 1999 Payne started a conservation-oriented
initiative called the Elephant Listening Project (ELP), whose purpose
is to develop an acoustic monitoring program for forest elephants.
Because of the density of trees in their equatorial rainforest habitats,
most forest elephant populations cannot be censused visually. Forest
elephants belong to a separate species, Loxodonta cyclotis,
which is doubly endangered by forest destruction and by current
political trends. In two intensive field seasons focused on a unique
population that predictably visits a forest clearing in the Central
African Republic, the ELP team used video recordings and an acoustic
array to document the extent to which calling behavior reflects
the elephants' numbers and circumstances. The results of this effort
are now nearly ready to be put to use in the service of conservation,
because of the simultaneous development of new hardware and software
for automatic detection and analysis of large sets of animal sounds.
Gradually, the Bioacoustics Research Program engineers and biologists
participating in this project are yielding a relatively simple and
inexpensive, non-invasive process which will enable rangers to assess
the size and health of forest elephant populations on the basis
of their calls.
The same data provide an opening
into a deeper understanding of elephants' call repertoire and the
ways in which each kind of call contributes to the social structure
and welfare of elephant communities.
Payne is the author of Silent
Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants (1998) and Elephants Calling
(1992), a children's book.
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