Payne has decoded the sound of a female elephant summoning males during the few days she's in heat. In an experiment on the plains of Namibia, Payne played this call on a loudspeaker. Male elephants in the area made a beeline for the speaker. Researchers also have identified calls used by matriarchs to round up the family, calls among bulls, and calls between moms and their babies. Disney's Animal Kingdom in Orlando is tackling the same problem by outfitting elephants with collars and a hidden microphone, which together weigh 12 pounds.
Researchers record the calls and videotape the elephants at the same time.
Later the calls are matched up with the video to identify which ones spoke and what happened. While Savage hopes to find out a great deal about elephant communication, she is uncertain how complex it is. Much remains to be learned. To see if elephants recognized voices as humans did, Payne recently conducted an experiment with tape recordings made 15 years ago, of a pair of elephants now dead. The elephants, Rosy and Tonga, had lived in an Oregon zoo.