Friday, May 10, 2013

This Week's Sci-light



Elephants are large but gentle and intelligent creatures.  Have you ever wondered how they communicate with each other? Biologist and conservationist Joyce Poole and husband Petter Granli have begun to decipher their sophisticated sign language. Poole and Granli founded a charity called ElephantVoices, which advocates research and conservation of elephants in Africa. While aiding pachyderms in Africa, they thought it would be helpful to pick up on their mannerisms, and turn that into solid information about how they interact.
They created a sort of catalogue of the different elephant gestures and behaviors so that the information could be readily available to everyone.  The database includes different categories: attentive, aggressive, ambivalent, defensive, social integration, mother-offspring, sexual, play and death. Through their observing they have matched certain gestures and movements with emotions.  Ear spreading translates into aggression, sniffing signifies attentiveness, a group advance shows defensiveness and caressing demonstrates loving and comforting usually between a mother and her offspring. Read the whole article at NationalGeographic to learn more about how elephants have a sense of humor, how they deal with death and more.




2 comments:

  1. Interesting topic. I just finished reading Mary Roach's book, Gulp. She is always a good read and her book finishes up in essentially the same place as the Gut Project. It is a whole new way of looking at ourselves.

    Pam at CLiPS
    http://stc-clips.org

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  2. Thanks for the added reading suggestion! Sounds interesting.

    Cindy at C-DEBI

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