Elephant age estimated from voice
Thursday, March 6, 2014 - 08:33
in Biology & Nature
A paper published in Bioacoustics explains how researchers have been able to estimate the age of an elephant based on its vocal sounds. Results showed that they could distinguish infants, calves, juveniles, and adults with 70% accuracy and youngsters (infants/calves) from adults with 95% accuracy. The call feature that was most useful for doing this was overall frequency—not surprisingly, since vocal frequency usually decreases as an animal grows larger.