How elephants talk to each other across ten kilometres
Much of what elephants say is below the range of human hearing, and some of it travels through the ground. Here is how a herd keeps in touch when it cannot see or hear itself.
Watch a herd of elephants at a waterhole and you will see a lot of touching, a lot of ear movement and occasionally a trumpet. What you will not hear is most of the conversation. Elephants produce rumbles with a fundamental frequency of around 14 to 35 hertz, at or below the bottom of human hearing, and those rumbles carry information about identity, emotion, reproductive state and intention.
The discovery
The infrasound was found almost by accident. In 1984 the acoustic biologist Katy Payne, who had spent years studying whale song, was standing near the elephants at a zoo in Oregon when she felt a throbbing in the air, like the pressure before a thunderclap. Recordings slowed down and shifted into audible range showed a rich vocabulary of calls nobody had known existed. Payne went on to found the Elephant Listening Project at Cornell, which has been recording and decoding elephant rumbles ever since.
Low frequencies travel far. In the right conditions, at dusk when the air is still and the temperature inversion holds the sound close to the ground, an elephant's rumble can be heard by another elephant several kilometres away, with estimates for ideal conditions running to ten kilometres and beyond. It is how a female in oestrus can draw bulls from across a park, and how family groups that split up to feed know where the others are.
Listening with their feet
Then there is the ground. Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell, working at Stanford and in Etosha, showed in a series of experiments through the 2000s that elephants also detect seismic vibrations: the low-frequency rumbles and the thump of running feet pass into the earth and travel as surface waves. Elephants sense them through the sensitive pads of their feet and through bone conduction, sometimes freezing and leaning forward with a foot raised to listen. When she played a recorded alarm call through the ground at a waterhole, the herds bunched together and faced the direction it came from. Seismic signals travel further than airborne ones and are less affected by wind, which may be why elephants pay them such attention.
What it means for you
At a sighting, the stillness is not nothing. An elephant standing motionless with its ears spread and its trunk low may be listening to a call you cannot hear, from a herd you cannot see. The best guides read it: a sudden collective turn, a matriarch's rumble that sends the family moving as one, the arrival of a bull from nowhere. The herd is talking. We are the ones who are deaf.
Checked October 2026. Entry rules, fees and seasons change; confirm with official sources before you book.
