
An elephant family rests under a tree in the hot midday heat. Situations like this were perfect for the playback experiments.
by SdS
In October 2007 Lucy King and colleagues first made a splash by reporting that African elephants seemed to be rather put off by bees. I was still in Sri Lanka during my big “data collection year” as a graduate student, trying to figure out the social relationships among Asian elephants and recording vocalizations whenever I got a chance. Lucy’s first paper was a curiosity, but then three years later she followed it up with the even more intriguing finding that African elephants even produce alarm calls specific to bees. This got the attention of my advisor at Penn, Dorothy Cheney, who having expended considerable time thinking about such things as monkey alarm calls, dropped me a one-liner: “Have you seen this?” Continue reading