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Elephants "Hear" Warnings With Their Feet

The elephants can get the news by feeling the ground rumble, a team of scientists recently confirmed. The vocalizations and foot stomps resonate at a frequency that elephants can detect in the ground, according to Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell, a biologist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

As to the scientists the elephants gathered around a watering hole in Etosha National Park in Namibia and they bunch into a tighter group, orient in the direction of where the signal is coming from, and then leave the area much sooner than they would if nothing was played. These behaviors are indications that the elephants detected the call and interpreted it as a warning. Preliminary results suggest that elephants react most vigilantly to familiar warning calls, but they also crowd together and act nervous when they detect unfamiliar calls.