Noise matters: elephants show risk-avoidance behaviour in response to human-generated seismic cues.

ABSTRACT: African elephants (Loxodonta africana) use many sensory modes to gather information about their environment, including the detection of seismic, or ground-based, vibrations. Seismic information is known to include elephant-generated signals, but also potentially encompasses biotic cues that are commonly referred to as 'noise'. To investigate seismic information transfer in elephants beyond communication, here we tested the hypothesis that wild elephants detect and discriminate between seismic vibrations that differ in their noise types, whether elephant- or human-generated. We played three types of seismic vibrations to elephants: seismic recordings of elephants (elephant-generated), white noise (human-generated) and a combined track (elephant- and human-generated). We found evidenc

SUBMITTER: Mortimer B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8242925 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature