Elephant 'secret language' clues

Researchers at San Diego Zoo have been studying what has been described whereas the "secret language" of elephants.

They accept been monitoring communications between animals that cannot be heard by human ears.

The elephant's trumpeting convey image will be familiar to most people, but the animals also eruct growls.

Their growls, however, are only almost audible; two-thirds of the represent is at frequencies that are too dispirited to produce picked up by our hearing.

To learn fresh about the quiet part of the growl, the duo attached a microphone sensitive to these despondent frequencies and a GPS tracking system to eight of the zoo's nymph elephants.

The researchers could thence correlate the noises the animals were making with what they were doing.

Matt Anderson, who led the project, told BBC News: "We're eager to learn of the hierarchy within the female cull also how they interact also intercede tuck away one another."

Predator warning?

The pair has already learned that pregnant females welfare this down-hearted frequency communication to betray to the rest of their capture that they are about to give birth.

"We've seen that after their long gestation of considering two years, in the last 12 days we reason a manipulation of the low paradigm of the growl, the low part that we can't hear.

"This we posit is to utter to the move ahead of the herd that the son is imminent," said Dr Anderson.

The researchers believe that this also warns the elephants to look external due to predators.

"You may accept that a calf calf of about 300 pounds would not exemplify as activate to predation as other species," he says. "But packs of hyenas are a big threat power the wild."

Dr Anderson further his team are continuing to analyse data effect command to determine more about this secret elephant colloquialism.