You might not think it's easy to hide an elephant, but those living in forests can be frustratingly elusive. So instead of macheteing their way to the beasts, scientists have hatched a plan to listen in on the forest dwellers to take a better measure of the threatened population.
A subspecies of Africa's savannah elephants, forest elephants face threats from habitat loss and poachers after their tusks. Previous efforts to track the stealthy pachyderms relied on counting dung heaps. "But that doesn't tell you the whole story," says acoustic biologist Katharine B. Payne of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
By eavesdropping on forest elephants' private conversations, Payne's team hopes to determine how many roam together, when they move, and where they go. The first step, she says, is to correlate elephant calls with behaviors. Next March the group will collect video and audio footage of forest elephant activity in a clearing in the Central African Republic. Then in May, the researchers will place audio receivers at a larger, densely forested site in Ghana and use the earlier recordings to interpret the sounds of hidden elephants. They have already deciphered the elephant's love noises: Females ready to mate groan loudly and insistently to summon males as far away as 4 kilometers.
