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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.
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.
ReplyDeletePam at CLiPS
http://stc-clips.org
Thanks for the added reading suggestion! Sounds interesting.
ReplyDeleteCindy at C-DEBI