TEDWomen: Vibrations offer new way to track elephants

1 December 2018

Researchers have come up with a new way of tracking elephants, via the vibrations that the animals make.

Scientists Dr Beth Mortimer and Prof Tarje Nissen-Meyer discovered that elephants generate vibrations through their normal movements and through vocalisations, known as "rumbles".

These can be measured by techniques usually used for studying earthquakes.

The Oxford academics spoke about their research at the TEDWomen conference currently under way in California.

They explained how they measured the seismic waves that could travel nearly four miles through the ground.

They recorded the vibrations generated by wild elephants in Kenya while walking and calling, using instruments known as geophones.

Seismological modelling software that incorporates the local geological information was combined with computer algorithms to produce accurate estimates of the seismic waves produced by elephants.

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Vibrations tell bees where mates are from

Date:October 22, 2015

Source:Cell Press

In choosing among potential suitors, red mason bee females pay attention to the specific way in which males of the species vibrate their bodies. Now, researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on October 22 have found that those vibrations carry important information about where their potential mates are from.

The findings are the first to suggest that bees rely on vibrations, in addition to chemical signals, as a mode of mate recognition.

"We were really surprised to find that bees use vibrational signals not only as a sign for fitness but also for information on where a male comes from," says Taina Conrad of the University of Ulm in Germany. "This is complex information, and we did not expect this to be encoded in this signal."

Red mason bees (O. bicornis) in Europe fall into one of two main subspecies, which are hard to tell apart from one another. The two differ only in one morphological trait: the color of the hair on the tips of their abdomens, which is either black or red.

Earlier studies showed that female bees rely on vibrational signals to identify stronger mates, preferentially choosing males that vibrate for longer periods of time. Conrad and Manfred Ayasse wondered whether those vibrational signals might also carry information about a male bee's subspecies identity.

To find out, they attached a small magnet to the males' thoraxes, using a frequency generator and electromagnetic field to transfer a previously recorded signal from a male of one subspecies onto the magnet (and the male) of the other subspecies.

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'Purring' Wolf Spiders Softly Serenade Mates

by Laura Geggel, Staff Writer | May 28, 2015 11:30am ET

Male wolf spiders use "purring" vibrations to serenade their sweethearts, but this wooing only works if the females can feel these vibrations, new research finds.

For the females to feel these vibrations, the courting couple must be standing on a suitable surface that can vibrate, like dry leaves, the researchers said in the new study.

Scientists had known that wolf spiders could make airborne sounds that are audible to humans. But this group of spiders doesn't have typical ears, and it's assumed that the critters can't actually hear any airborne sounds, said Alexander Sweger, a doctoral student of biology at the University of Cincinnati, who presented the unpublished research at the Acoustical Society of America's annual meeting in Pittsburgh on May 21. [Watch Wolf Spiders Make "Purring" Vibrations (Video)]

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Spider-style sensor detects vibrations

11 December 2014 Last updated at 11:39

By Jonathan Webb

Science reporter, BBC News

By copying the design of an organ found in spiders' legs, engineers in South Korea have built a sensor that can detect miniscule vibrations.

It works because the vibrations open and close cracks in a very thin layer of platinum, changing its conductivity.

A similar slit-based system is found inside the joints of some spiders.

The team reports in the journal Nature that when they stick their sensor to the neck or wrist, it can read out what someone says - or their pulse.

Speaking to BBC News, Prof Mansoo Choi said the project began two years ago, when one of his colleagues at Seoul National University read a paper in the same journal.

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