DAWN TO DUSK NEWS: giant mammals

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Elephants are able to 
differentiate between ethnicities and genders, and can tell an adult 
from a child - all from the sound of a human voice.</div>
This is according to a study in which researchers played voice recordings to wild African elephants.  <br />

The animals showed more fear when they heard the voices of adult Masai men.   <br />

Livestock-herding Masai people do come into conflict with 
elephants, and this suggests that animals have adapted to specifically 
listen for and avoid them. <br />

The study is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. <br />

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Nature's giants</h2>
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  <img alt="African elephant (Image: Graeme Shannon)" src="http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/70846000/jpg/_70846741_70827687.jpg" />

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<ul>
<li> African elephants are the largest living land animals</li>
<li> Until recently there was one species of elephant in Africa - 
but they are now classified as either forest or bush (or savannah) 
elephants</li>
<li> Forest elephants, as the name suggests, are found in equatorial forests and have straighter trunks and rounded ears</li>
<li> Bush elephants are more widespread, mostly south of the Sahara in a range of habitats including savannah, swamps and deserts</li>
</ul>
<em><br /></em><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature"></a>

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Prof Karen McComb and Dr Graeme 
Shannon from the University of Sussex, who led the study, explained that
 in previous research they had used similar playback experiments to 
reveal that elephants could tell - from the sound of a lion's roar - 
whether the animal was a female or a more dangerous male. </div>
Other studies have shown that elephants respond with fear to the scent and even to the red colour of the Masai clothing. <br />

"I've experienced that," explained Prof McComb. <br />

"If you give a Masai man a lift in your car, you can see the elephants behave in a different way around you. <br />

"They're much more wary of the car and you see a lot of smelling and listening." <br />

Prof McComb wanted to find out if the animals used their very
 acute sense of hearing to identify a potential threat from humans. <br />

The scientists recorded Masai men, women and children saying,
 in their own language, "look, look over there, a group of elephants is 
coming". <br />

They also recorded Kamba men saying this phrase. <br />

While cattle-herding Maasai people often encounter 
free-ranging elephants, which can result in violent conflict, the Kamba 
people's more agricultural lifestyle does not generally bring them into 
aggressive contact with the animals. <br />

When the team played recordings of these different voices 
through a camouflaged loudspeaker, they found that elephant family 
groups reacted more fearfully in response to the voice of a Masai man, 
than to a Kamba man's voice - retreating and bunching together 
defensively.<br />

And the adult male Masai voices triggered far more of these defensive reactions than the voices of women or boys.<br />

<span class="cross-head">Hidden sounds</span>
       An additional and unexpected finding was that when the 
researchers changed the pitch and frequency of the voices - making a 
male Masai voice sound more female - the elephants would still react in 
the same way as they did to the original recording. <br />

<span style="width: 624px;">The matriarch in a family of elephants acts as an anchor - keeping her group together in the face of danger</span>
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"That suggests they're using completely different cues [to us] in order to attribute gender," said Prof McComb. <br />

Frans van der Waal from the Yerkes National Primate Research 
Center at Emory University, a researcher and the author of several books
 on animal behaviour, wrote in an accompanying article in PNAS that this
 finding suggested we had "much to learn about how elephants make 
decisions".<img height="360" src="http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/70373000/jpg/_70373006_70369326.jpg" width="640" /><br />
In this brief clip, Professor Richard Byrne describes how elephants respond to human pointing<div class="videoInStoryC">
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He added in an interview with BBC News: "Making these kinds of fine distinctions in human voice patterns is quite remarkable."<br />

Prof McComb said the research showed that elephants were "trying to adapt" to human threat<br />
s.  <br />

"Humans are undoubtedly the most dangerous and versatile predators the elephants are face<br />
d with these days," she said.  <br />

Prof de Waal added: "The more we understand about how 
elephants navigate their physical and social worlds, and how their 
behaviour continues to adapt to ever-changing threats, the better able 
we will be to effectively work to protect them in the wild."<br />
<em>Source: </em>BBC Nature<br />
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Elephants recognise human voices

Elephants are able to differentiate between ethnicities and genders, and can tell an adult from a child - all from the sound of a ...