Elephants, the biggest mammal on the land, are an extremely important animal population, both biologically and economically. They’re known as “keystone” species because of their significant influences on other animals and on African and Asian ecosystems.

Elephants contribute enormously to national revenues generated through ecotourism. However, elephant populations in parts of Africa and Asia have declined dramatically over the last twenty years. They continue to face many threats, including deforestation, human encroachment, weak park management and the booming illegal international trade in ivory products.

IFAW is collaborating with the Bioacoustics Research Program (BRP) at Cornell’s Laboratory of Ornithology on an Elephant Listening Project. This groundbreaking work records elephants’ low-frequency “infrasounds” or rumbles, which are inaudible to human ears.

This acoustic monitoring system enables wildlife experts and regional and national governments to assess and monitor the numbers and health of elephants by eavesdropping on the sounds they make.

The Elephant Listening Project was founded in 1999 with the primary focus on forest elephants, a sub-species of the African elephant, which live in deep equatorial rainforests where sightings are rare and taking a visual census is impossible.

Elephants make powerful infrasonic calls (below the level of human hearing) which travel long distances. Those calls are then analyzed with visual observations to correlate elephant numbers and behaviors.

Continual improvements to the acoustic monitoring will allow evaluation of current conservation efforts and provide information critical to the future of this species. The importance of this work is growing as the wild parts of the world are shrinking.

Now you can listen to the secret life of elephants and learn about IFAW’s work to protect elephants. You also can join IFAW and learn more about their work for a better world for animals and people.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 at 8:02 pm and is filed under Animal World, Environment, IFAW. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.