Do elephants use seismic signals (sound waves transferred through the ground) to communicate with one another?
Experiments have shown that elephant vocalizations and movements do travel through the ground as seismic or Raleigh waves and that they travel at a faster rate than the rate at which they travel through the air. Some scientists claim that elephants’ extremely sensitive feet and trunks might be able to detect these vibrations from the ground, other suggest that they may detect these vibrations through bone conduction. Others oppose this proposal saying that there are too many factors in an elephant’s environment that would garble underground sound waves, making it impractical as a form of communication. Though we don’t yet know whether elephants use seismic waves as a form of communicative interchange, we are pretty sure that they are able to sense certain seismic waves and that they respond to them accordingly. For example, elephants have been observed to react with alarm to earthquakes several seconds before human beings perceive them, and presumably this is because they are able to d
