'Google Translate' for Elephants: A New Online Catalogue Containing Everything We Know About Elephant Communication
The Elephant Ethogram is an free online database that hopes to inspire and contribute to conservation efforts.
Calls and gestures that convey specific meanings, culturally learned behaviors, and maintaining social bonds through tactile sensations: elephants possess an incredibly rich repertoire of communication techniques.
Now, to help scientists keep up with elephant behavior, renowned biologist Joyce Poole, who has been studying endangered savanna elephants for nearly 50 years, has co-founded a new tool considered the “Google Translate” for elephants, with her husband and fellow-researcher, Petter Granli.
The Elephant Ethogram is an online, easy-to-navigate, animal catalogue that has everything known about elephant’s behavior and communication. It currently includes more than 500 behaviors depicted through nearly 3,000 annotated videos, photographs and audio files. The entries were collected from more than 100 references, with data going back as early as 1907.
Around half of the documented behaviours came from the two investigators' own studies and observations, while the rest came from about seven other prominent savanna elephant research teams. Their database is available to the public and it is intended to be a living catalogue where other researchers add their own observations and discoveries about elephants over the coming years.
“Without a multimedia approach, I see it as impossible to properly show and explain the behavior of a species, and we hope this will inspire other scientists to take a similar approach for other species,” Poole told media outlet Scientific American. “At a time when biodiversity is plummeting and the lives of elephants are being heavily impacted by humans, we also want to spell out to the world what we stand to lose.”
Today, both Asian and African species of elephant are facing mammoth threats to their survival including habitat loss, which leads to human-elephant conflict, and poaching for the illegal ivory trade.
“Elephants, quite honestly, are running out of time. They’re running out of space… And they need more people to care about them,” Poole said. “[If] people can go in and see how very complex these animals are, how creative they are and how versatile their behavior is, how rich it is — that we could maybe inspire more people to care.”
Elephants kept in zoos, circuses, and work environments, are prevented from engaging in many of their natural behaviors, causing them to develop compulsive, repetitive behaviors, such as rocking back and forth. The ethogram will also highlight the behavioral differences between captive elephants and their wild counterparts, says Poole, helping to bolster the case for ending elephant captivity.
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