Infrasonic calls are audible to other elephants miles away, allowing separated animals to find one another. The sound data is eagerly awaited by Andrea Turkalo, who spent the last nine years documenting the demography and behavior of some 2,000 forest elephants in the Central African Republic. The first phase of the forest elephant acoustic monitoring is supported by a Species Action grant from World Wildlife Fund and is conducted at the Bioacoustics Research Program, a unit of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. During last month's gathering, which was sponsored by the Cornell laboratory, World Wildlife Fund, Wildlife Conservation Society and Conservation International, the prospective collaborators wrote proposals to fund the remaining phases. All organisms, large and small, are linked.
Elephants just happen to be one of the bigger links.