Birds twitter. Cats meow. Dogs bark. And elephants…rumble.

It’s one of the most curious corners of the biophony – the low-frequency noise (on the lower edge of our own hearing) that elephants send into the ground to attract a mate. The vibration is picked up by potential partners through their forelegs, and from there it’s transmitted to a bone in their middle ear (here’s the science of it – pdf). Amazingly, this may work over distances of up to 6 miles. It’s only one aspect of the diverse, sophisticated language that elephants employ, but it’s one that environmentalists are using to save elephant lives.

In Namibia, elephants are only protected within the boundaries of the Etosha National Parks. When bull elephants stray outside, they trample on crops, destroy property and threaten livelihoods – and enraged farmers respond with hails of bullets. If the elephants can be encouraged to respect borders, they will remain safe.

And that’s where rumblings come in. By sending similar vibrations into the ground using speakers, park rangers could lure elephants deeper into the park where they’re safest. (Since the rangers will be attracting bull elephants on heat, it’s safe to assume Jeep maintenance will become an even higher priority).

So are elephants unique in using this seismic chatline? And with all the noise we make from mining and construction, how many of the natural world’s conversations are we butting in on?

Image: lillarkie

The post How to Woo an Elephant (Insincerely) appeared first on EcoSalon.

Hundreds of years ago, it used to eat the bottoms of sailing ships. Now, it could help keep the bio-energy industry afloat.

It’s called the gribble. A marine isopod with a taste for wood (think woodlouse), the four-spotted variety called Limnoria quadripunctata used to burrow through the hulls of wooden ships, causing no end of grief for medieval sailors. In fact, lore holds Christopher Columbus was stranded in Jamaica for a year after his ship suffered a particularly nasty gribbling.

But gribbles have just made the transition from pest to scientific marvel. Studies undertaken by the Centre for Novel Agricultural Products in the University of York, England, are investigating exactly how the gribble’s stomach is able to break down the complex polysaccharides in cellulose into sugars that can be fermented. The end product would be an energy-packed liquid biofuel – in other words, a potential replacement for gasoline.

The gribble’s digestive enzymes are unlike any seen in animals before, and experts hope that by replicating them a new generation of super-efficient biofuels could result. The technology is unlikely to alleviate the food or fuel crisis (our money is on algae) but it’s yet another remarkable example of how the natural world has already solved a problem that had us stumped…even if it is a little hard to be bested by a woodlouse.

image: mike baird

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