"Many such experiments on predator call replay have been tried on elephants, but the primary drawback is that elephants ultimately realise the hoax," says Sushant Chowdhury, a senior scientist at the Wildlife Institute of India. Other experts are not sure if this approach will succeed in the long run. He adds that the loudspeakers could also warn villagers of invading elephants - potentially avoiding dangerous contact.
Thuppil says that if tiger growl playbacks are deployed continuously during crop growing they could prevent elephants raiding fields. But the calls of leopards - which, unlike tigers, do not prey on young elephants - prompted the elephants to linger in the area while trumpeting and grunting aggressively. When elephants crossed the beams they triggered a playback of a recording of either tiger or leopard growls.Īnalysis of movement showed that elephants retreated quickly and silently on hearing the tiger growls. To avoid such danger, Thuppil positioned infrared beams on paths usually taken by the elephants on their routes to crops. "Studying elephant behaviour at night is extremely risky," says lead author Vivek Thuppil, an animal behaviourist at the University of California, Davis, United States.Īccording to a paper in Gajah, the journal of the Asian Elephant Specialist Group (AsESG), 226 people and 87 elephants have died in clashes between 20. The study, published in the current edition of Biology Letters, looked at the night time behaviour of elephants, and particularly their reaction to 'aggressive' tiger and leopard growls, in villages bordering two animal reserves in the Indian states of Karnataka and Kerala.
There have been hundreds of deaths and much crop loss in the last decade in areas where elephants come into contact with people. Lives could be saved and crops protected by playing sounds of growling tigers to wild elephants on their way to raid fields in India, a study reports.
Tiger growl recordings deter crop-raiding elephants