I went out with Lucy King D Phil researcher who is working on a PHD investigating the relationship between Elephants and Bees which is producing very exciting results indeed, and with Joseph Soltis who is a visiting scientist from Disney. Joseph specialises on animal acoustics in animal behaviour. At the moment the pair is working on recording elephant vocalisations and physical reactions to the sounds of Bees and Samburu voices. In order to do this they are conducting an experiment that plays to resting elephant groups the sound of Samburu voices talking and singing and then recording the vocal and physical reactions to this. They have already got quite a number of reactions off different families, so we set out to try and find a new family to do the experiment on. We were highly successful today performing the experiment on the American Indians and the Biblical towns, two families that had not been done. The key is to find a family that is resting in the middle of the day and is very relaxed and stationary, so the elephant’s reaction to the noise is based purely on the sounds being played to them. Today the family’s reactions to the Samburu voices were fascinating to observe, the whole family travel in the direction opposite to the speaker, almost instantly.
This is a cow from the Biblical town’s family and her calf. We had to wait approx. an hour until the group were relaxed and snoozing below a tree, completely unsuspecting that any experiment was about to go on. For more information on Lucy’s exciting PHD project go to www.elephantsandbees.com or look at the Save the elephants website.