/ 21 October 2002

It’s a feeling in the feet

Last Friday, September 13, was a bad day for the elephants of the Sabi Sands game reserve next to the Kruger National Park. Normally placid herds charged around in apparent terror, trumpeting, shaking their heads and running with their tails stuck straight out behind them.

The air of fear probably had nothing to with triskaidekaphobia — a superstition humans associate with Friday falling on the 13th — but rather with a feeling in the elephants’ feet. Recent research into the elephant bush telegraph indicates they can pick up underground vibrations hundreds of kilometres away through nerve endings in their sponge-like feet.

Last Friday elephants in the Kruger park were being rounded up by helicopter, darted and relocated by truck to Mozambique’s Limpopo National Park. About 50 elephants were moved last week, part of a five-year Operation Noah aimed at restocking wildlife reserves in the neighbouring country.

Marion Garai, head of the Elephant Management and Owners’ Association, says the Sabi Sands herds may have been terrified by the underground seismic signals they received from the Kruger translocations.

Seismic sensitivity is opening a new era of research in elephant communications. The findings are as revolutionary as discoveries in the early 1980s that elephants communicate with each other over distances of up to 30km by using infrasound — sound below 30 Herz, the level of human hearing. That research, among African elephants in East Africa, led to a rethink of wildlife management strategies like culling.

”Elephants in huge areas coordinate their movements, particularly when they are in danger. We used to think this was because of their infrasound vocalisations, but the new research shows there may be much more to it,” says Garai.

A group of Asian elephants was recently observed reacting to rumbles from a thunderstorm about 150km away. Soon afterwards they moved to the area where the thunder had come from, expecting to find rain.

Researchers from Stanford University in California published a paper in December 2000 indicating that Asian elephants communicate over more than 30km through foot stomps. They say it appears nerve endings beneath the animals’ toenails pick up the seismic signals and transmit them to the elephants’ inner ears.

Garai says the new research may show that elephants are as traumatised by translocations as they are by the culling and hunting of fellow pachyderms.

Ironically, the Sabi Sands — set up as a private hunting reserve on the western border of the Kruger park in the early 1930s — could soon provide the only sanctuary in the greater Kruger reserve area as hunters set their sights on the national park’s big tuskers.

A comprehensive economic report leaked to the media this week recommends that the world-renowned park could earn at least R57-million a year if the National Parks Act is changed to allow hunting in the Kruger. David Mabunda, Kruger’s director, denied any knowledge of the report, or that hunting was being considered.

Hunting of the Kruger’s animals came under the spotlight at a meeting in Hoedspruit last weekend. Heated debate erupted among owners of private reserves in Timbavati, Klaserie, Umbabat and Balule. Like the Sabi Sands, these reserves border on the west of the Kruger — and the fence to the national park was dropped in 1994.

A report on the effects of hunting elephants, buffalos and lions will be handed to conservation authorities at the end of next month.

Elephants are also hunted to the north of the Kruger — in the Makuleke contract park — and there are hunting concessions in the Limpopo transfrontier park to the east. By comparison, elephants in the Sabi Sands, which banned all hunting in the past decade, are relatively peaceful — until they pick up bad vibes in their feet.