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Publication Details
AFRICAN RESEARCH NEXUS
SHINING A SPOTLIGHT ON AFRICAN RESEARCH
general
Bee threat elicits alarm call in African elephants
PLoS ONE, Volume 5, No. 4, Article e10346, Year 2010
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Description
Unlike the smaller and more vulnerable mammals, African elephants have relatively few predators that threaten their survival. The sound of disturbed African honeybees Apis meliffera scutellata causes African elephants Loxodonta Africana to retreat and produce warning vocalizations that lead other elephants to join the flight. In our first experiment, audio playbacks of bee sounds induced elephants to retreat and elicited more head-shaking and dusting, reactive behaviors that may prevent bee stings, compared to white noise control playbacks. Most importantly, elephants produced distinctive "rumble" vocalizations in response to bee sounds. These rumbles exhibited an upward shift in the second formant location, which implies active vocal tract modulation, compared to rumbles made in response to white noise playbacks. In a second experiment, audio playbacks of these rumbles produced in response to bees elicited increased headshaking, and further and faster retreat behavior in other elephants, compared to control rumble playbacks with lower second formant frequencies. These responses to the bee rumble stimuli occurred in the absence of any bees or bee sounds. This suggests that these elephant rumbles may function as referential signals, in which a formant frequency shift alerts nearby elephants about an external threat, in this case, the threat of bees. © 2010 King.et al.
Authors & Co-Authors
King, Lucy E.
United Kingdom, Oxford
University of Oxford
Soltis, Joseph
United States, Lake Buena Vista
Disney's Animal Kingdom
Douglas-Hamilton, Iain
United Kingdom, Oxford
University of Oxford
Savage, Anne
United States, Lake Buena Vista
Disney's Animal Kingdom
Vollrath, Fritz
United Kingdom, Oxford
University of Oxford
Statistics
Citations: 59
Authors: 5
Affiliations: 2
Identifiers
Doi:
10.1371/journal.pone.0010346
ISSN:
19326203
Study Approach
Quantitative