Echo, the remarkable matriarch of a family of elephants in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park, was most studied elephant in the world, the subject of several books and documentaries, including two NATURE films. For nearly four decades, elephant expert Cynthia Moss, and award-winning filmmaker Martyn Colbeck were on hand to record the trials and triumphs of Echo and her family, documenting the intense loyalties and deep caring that are so fundamental to all elephants, creating a moving record of a life we all can share.

Echo died of natural causes at the age of 65 in May of 2009, leaving the family she had cared for and guided for so long to face the worst drought ever recorded in Amboseli on their own. It was a final test of the years of Echo’s leadership. Had she taught them all they would need to survive without her? Could her wisdom continue to provide for them even after her death?

With rich archival footage and warm recollections, Moss and Colbeck share their memories of Echo and her family as they follow the fortunes of Echo’s family during the drought. Echo is shown caring for her newborn son, Ely, who overcame the crippling condition he was born with thanks to her patience and extraordinary perseverance. Echo is also shown making a heartbreaking decision to abandon her mortally-wounded daughter, Erin, in order to save Erin’s young calf, Email. Moss and Colbeck have especially fond memories of Echo’s mischievous baby daughter, Ebony, whose playful nature was so endearing to them both. And they marvel as they recall Echo’s rescue of Ebony when she was kidnapped by a rival clan, remembering it as one of the defining moments of her leadership.

Happily, Echo’s legacy lives on. Though other elephant families suffer devastating losses, her family is able to survive the drought, retaining her wisdom for future generations, keeping her memory alive.

Highly intelligent, emotional, and expressive animals, it is little surprise that elephants live by social rules that are intricate. So complex and layered are they, that in elephant society males and females live in completely different worlds, with females dwelling in tightly bonded families that stay together for life, and males living a largely solitary existence.

Elephant families like Echo’s EB family are matriarchal societies. Within this structure, the matriarch, or lead female, rules over a multi-generational family of 6 to 12 members, most of which are her offspring, her sisters and their offspring. In Echo’s family, her sister Ella and daughters, Enid and Eliot help her keep the family in order along with her nieces, Emma and Eudora, her granddaughters, Edwina and Eleanor, and great-niece, Elspeth. Sadly, Echo’s daughter Erin was speared by humans and died. A tight-knit family like the EB works very cooperatively. They feed, rest, and move as one unit. Together they defend the family, search for food and care for offspring. Closely-related females will even cross suckle each other’s calves and some females will lactate indefinitely, taking on a wet nurse role in the family. Enid, Echo’s oldest daughter, has a natural mothering instinct and love for calves. She was an allomother, or babysitter, to her younger brother, Ely.

Echo’s Family Tree: Click to view larger. Courtesy of the Amboseli Elephant Research Project Click here for updated information.

As tight-knit as they are, if an elephant family gets too large, it can split in two. This actually benefits both families as each can forage for resources more effectively if they take on different territories. Typically, such a split would take place between cousins, and usually not sisters or mothers and daughters. These split families, or “bond groups” can average 28 related elephants in 2 to 3 family units. The related groups will continue to associate and occupy the same home range, staying within a mile of each other and keeping in touch through rumbling calls.

Though all members of the family are essential for the group’s success, it is the mighty matriarch who assumes the most critical role. Typically the oldest and largest female member of the family, it is not uncommon for the matriarch to be a close relation to the previous matriarch. To succeed in her role, the matriarch brings years of experience and natural skills at leading her family and keeping all of its members together. She also has a sharpened memory of places and individuals. The adage that an elephant never forgets has some truth to it. An old female can remember where her mother or grandmother took her for water during a drought 30 years earlier, the sort of historical information that can save a herd during hard times.

Matriarchs are charged with making decisions that ensure the family’s safety, health and survival. Tapping into her years of wisdom and experience, she decides when and where to feed, when to move along, when to fight and how. Her influence is so great that if a matriarch is shot by poachers, the herd will likely remain by their fallen leader and be shot as well. In the case of Echo and her famous EB family, Echo’s regularity and as Martyn Colbeck explains, predictability may have saved the lives of the family members. During the 1970s and 1980s, the area outside of the park had a dark history of poaching of elephants traveling in large groups. Echo’s insistence on keeping her family within the range of Amboseli Park kept them safe from poachers. Deferring to the experience of a wiser and older member and forming nearly unbreakable bonds allows for the exchange of critical survival skills to the next generation.

One method elephant society has evolved to keep the family robust and healthy is by forcing out males once they reach puberty-a measure that protects against inbreeding. As they grow older and approach puberty, males, or bulls, grow increasingly independent of their family. They will eventually break off from the group, usually at around 12 years of age. Unlike the highly social females, bulls will live a solitary life, forming relatively few close and long-lasting bonds with other elephants. They travel alone or congregate with a herd of two to 14 bulls, occasionally joining a family on a temporary basis. During the breeding season, bulls wander widely, searching for receptive females. After mating is over, they leave the family and either rejoin a bachelor herd or go back to a life of solitary wandering.

Humans have had a devastating influence on elephant society. As humans kill off vast numbers of elephants and encroach on their habitats, elephants grow increasingly anxious, disoriented and, at times, violent. Since older, larger animals are more likely to be targets for poachers because their tusks are largest-and these are also the members of the family with the most critical role– killing these individuals damages entire family units for years. Due to poaching, the number of older matriarchs and female caregivers has drastically fallen, and some elephant groups contain no adult females whatsoever. The number of elder bulls, who play a significant role in keeping younger males in line, has also fallen. All of this damage within elephant societies leads to incidents of “elephant rage” or attacks on humans and their property. By understanding how killing one elephant reverberates through elephant society, humans may come to realize how great an effect they have on elephants, and on other humans.

To find updated information on Echo’s family, go to: http://www.elephanttrust.org/node/634.

After years observing elephants in the wild, filmmaker Martyn Colbeck has learned how vast –  and how mysterious — the realm of elephant communication is. Elephants rely on a complex communication system to sustain their clan-based society. At the root of it is a common language.

Long-lived and large-brained, elephants are not only capable of expressing complex thoughts using this common language of intricate acoustics, they have a great deal of social and ecological knowledge to share.

Elephants have a wide range of calls and signals for different purposes — to secure their defense, warn others of danger, coordinate group movements, reconcile differences, attract mates, reinforce family bonds, and announce their needs and desires. Researchers like Joyce Poole have been trying to crack the code of the elephant communication for years. Poole has found that the elephants use more than 70 kinds of vocal sounds and 160 different visual and tactile signals, expressions, and gestures in their day-to-day interactions.

Vocal calls

Vocal calls are likely the most common way elephants confer. Calls are used for everything from caring for calves, reconciling differences during disagreements and coordinating the group’s next move. At the end of a meal, when it’s time to move on, one member of a family moves to the edge of the group, typically lifts one leg and flaps her ears. She repeats a “let’s go” rumble, which eventually rouses the whole family, who then hit the road. An elephant can recognize the calls of hundreds of other elephants from a half-mile away.

That famous shrill trumpet call is the one we most often associate with elephants but the creatures can also squeal, cry, scream, roar, snort, rumble, and groan to get their point across. Whatever form the call takes, it can be soft, abrasive, low-pitched or shrilling. There’s even a place for jackhammer-like ear splitting blasts as a danger or alarm call to signal others to form a protective circle around the younger members of the family group.

But of the motley assortment of calls in the elephant repertoire, deep growling or rumbling noises are, by far, the most common. Some researchers even postulate that each individual has its signature growl.

A recent discovery is that much of elephant language exists in a range that humans can’t even hear. The deepest sounds we can hear, the grunts or rumbles, are the mild overtones of low frequency sound from 1 and 20 Hz, which is below the level of human hearing. Such sounds are so low and powerful they travel unhampered for miles through forest, allowing elephants to send messages and warnings over long distances. These powerful, distant-traveling sounds are critical in helping males find females for breeding. Researchers say the infrasonic calls also enable elephants to reunite with friends and family members. One rumble means “Hello, I’m here,” another “Help, I’m lost” — important messages for helping separated family groups find each other.

Breeding herds also use low-frequency vocalizations to warn of predators. Adult bulls and cows have no enemies, except for humans, but young elephants are susceptible to attacks by lions and hyenas. When a predator appears, older members of the herd emit intense warning calls that prompt the rest of the herd to clump together for protection and then, if necessary, flee the scene.

One call researchers have just deciphered is the “contact call.” This call helps elephants locate distant family members. The elephant seeking to make contact lets out a powerful reverberating sound, after which it lifts its head to listen for a response. If it receives one, it emits an explosive sound. The pattern is repeated, possibly for hours, until the elephant successfully rejoins her family. Any reunion of elephants is met with an exuberant greeting. The greeting ceremony, as it’s called, is marked by trumpeting, screaming and rumbling.

Because males and females dwell in separate social worlds, different methods of communication exist for both. Researchers have found that females have the most extensive vocal repertoire. Seventy percent of all known calls are made by adult females, juveniles and calves, leaving only thirty percent for adult males.

Vocalizations are essential for the mating ritual. Males, with their solitary life, rely on calls to announce their sexual state, identity and rank. A bull in musth (or in breeding state) signals that he desires sexual activity by displaying specific courtship behavior, which includes the emission of scent, discharge of bodily fluids and broadcasting of infrasound calls. Such low, powerful calls carry more than 2 miles in the air. The infrasound call signals to other bulls to keep away, as bulls in musth are aggressive and dangerous. The cow has her own set of mating behaviors and calls. A female can broadcast her receptive state to bulls miles away, also through infrasound calls. After mating, the female rumbles out the post-copulatory sequence, a group of six grunts with strong overtones. She repeats this sequence several times, continuing for up to half an hour.

Non-vocal communication

Touching, caressing and smelling each other with their trunks also helps elephants maintain their social bonds. Tactile sensations are very important to communication in elephant society. Trunks are essential to their tactile sense. They use their trunks to caress each other or explore other objects. For instance, elephants communicate their interest in death when they touch and smell bones of dead elephants with their trunks. Members of groups passing one another in the brush will pause to exchange touches, while courting bulls will intertwine their trunks with the trunks of cows. Researchers have found that elephants also appear to communicate by sensing seismic vibrations through the soft skin on the pads of their feet. Elephants may also lay their trunks on the ground to detect vibrations in the earth.

One distinct behavior of elephants in the wild is synchronized freezing. Remaining motionless helps elephants focus their keen senses of smell and hearing on unfamiliar noises and odors in the air. Smell is their most developed sense. With their long trunks, elephants can keep track of odors on the ground as they walk head up, and they routinely touch and smell each other’s bodies with their trunks.

Elephants rely on their varied and sophisticated means of communication not only to orient themselves properly in the world, but also to recognize, honor and somehow carry on the world of the past. Understanding how elephants exchange information and what they seek to express teaches us so much about their fascinating world.

Elephants, the largest land animals on the planet, are among the most exuberantly expressive of creatures. Joy, anger, grief, compassion, love; the finest emotions reside within these hulking masses. Through years of research, scientists have found that elephants are capable of complex thought and deep feeling. In fact, the emotional attachment elephants form toward family members may rival our own.

Joy

In the wild, joy is an emotion that elephants have no shame in showing. They express their happiness and joy when they are amongst their loved ones-family and friends. Playing games and greeting friends or family members all elicit displays of joy.

But the one event that stirs a level of elephant happiness beyond compare is the birth of a baby elephant. In Echo: An Elephant to Remember, the birth of Ebony is one such occasion. The excitement of several of the females in Echo’s family can’t be contained as they are heard bellowing and blaring during the birth of the new baby.

Another highly emotional occasion in an elephant’s life is an elephant reunion. This joyful meeting between related, but separated, elephants is one of exuberance and drama. The greeting ceremony marks the incredible welcoming of a formerly absent family member. During the extraordinary event, the elephants about to be united begin calling each other from a quarter a mile away. As they get closer, their pace quickens. Their excitement visibly flows as fluid from their temporal glands streams down the sides of their faces. Eventually, the elephants make a run towards each other, screaming and trumpeting the whole time. When they finally make contact, they form a loud, rumbling mass of flapping ears, clicked tusks and entwined trunks. The two leaning on each other, rubbing each other, spinning around, even defecating, and urinating (for this is what elephants do when they are experiencing sheer delight). With heads held high, the reunited pair fill the air with a symphony of trumpets, rumbles, screams, and roars. Bliss.

Love

There is no greater love in elephant society than the maternal kind. Nobody who observes a mother with her calf could doubt this. It is one of the most touching aspects of elephant social customs. The calf is so small compared to the adult that it walks under its mother, who, incredibly, does not step on it or trip over it. Mother and child remain in constant touch. If a calf strays too far from its mother, she will fetch it. The mother often touches her child with trunk and legs, helping it to its feet with one foot and her trunk. She carries it over obstacles and hauls it out of pits or ravines. She pushes it under her to protect it from predators or hot sun. She bathes it, using her trunk to spray water over it and then to scrub it gently. The mother steers her calf by grasping its tail with her trunk, and the calf follows, holding its mother’s tail. When the calf squeals in distress, its mother and others rush to its protection immediately. It is easy to see why the bond between mother and daughter lasts 50 years or more.

Grief

One of the most moving displays of elephant emotion is the grieving process. Elephants remember and mourn loved ones, even many years after their death. When an elephant walks past a place that a loved one died he or she will stop and take a silent pause that can last several minutes. While standing over the remains, the elephant may touch the bones of the dead elephant (not the bones of any other species), smelling them, turning them over and caressing the bones with their trunk. Researchers don’t quite understand the reason for this behavior. They guess the elephants could be grieving. Or they could they be reliving memories. Or perhaps the elephant is trying to recognize the deceased. Whatever the reason, researchers suspect that the sheer interest in the dead elephant is evidence that elephants have a concept of death.

Researchers have described mother elephants who appear to go through a period of despondency after the death of a calf, dragging behind the herd for days. They’ve also witnessed an elephant herd circling a dead companion disconsolately. After some time, and likely when they realized the elephant was dead, the family members broke off branches, tore grass clumps and dropped these on the carcass. Another researcher noted a family of African elephants surrounding a dying matriarch. The family stood around her and tried to get her up with their tusks and put food in her mouth. When the rest of the herd finally moved on, one female and one calf stayed with her, touching her with their feet.

Rage and Stress

Terror, rage and stress, unfortunately, are also commonplace in the elephant repertoire of emotions. Terror afflicts baby African elephants who wake up screaming in the middle of the night after they have witnessed their families murdered and poached — a type of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Some researchers suggest a species-wide trauma is taking place in wild elephant populations. They say that elephants are suffering from a form of chronic stress after sustaining decades of killings and habitat loss. The recent surge in cases of wild elephant rage reported by the media is a sad indicator of the kind of stress that wild elephants are undergoing. Nearly 300 persons are killed every year by wild elephants in India. But the increasing numbers of deaths are closely correlated to the ever-increasing human presence in traditional wild elephant habitats, as well as the the effects of climate change, and loss of territory and resources. The ongoing competition between elephants and humans for available land and resources is leading to ever more unfortunate and often deadly consequences.

Human activity does more than put a stress on elephants to find resources. It can often disrupt the complex and delicate web of familial and societal relations that are so important in elephant society. Calves are carefully protected and guarded by members of the matriarchal elephant family. Any perception of danger triggers a violent reaction from the matriarch and, subsequently, the entire family. The extremes a family will go to protect a vulnerable new calf are reported in the news stories as fits of unprovoked “elephant rage.” Charging a village, storming into huts where harvested crop is stored, plundering fields and, if disturbed, turning violent are some of the instances reported by the media.

Compassion and Altruism

Compassion is not reserved for offspring alone in elephant society. Elephants appear to make allowances for other members of their herd. Observers noted that one African herd always traveled slowly because one of its members had never recovered from a broken leg. And in another case, a park warden reported a herd that traveled slowly because one female was carrying around a dead calf. One perplexing report was of an adult elephant making repeated attempt to help a baby rhinoceros stuck in the mud. She continued to try to save the baby rhino despite the fact that its mother charged her each time. Risking her life for the sake of an animal that is not her own, not related to her, or even her own species is remarkably altruistic in nature.

While there is a great deal more to learn about what elephants feel, such accounts are astonishing. They reveal a creature that weeps, revels, rages and grieves. They lead us to believe that the depth of elephant emotional capacity knows no limit. They are striking for they suggest that elephants act on feelings and not solely for survival.

Award-winning filmmaker, Martyn Colbeck, has filmed wildlife for over 20 years, capturing our planet’s most incredible species with his lens. But it was Echo and her family of elephants that inspired Martyn to devote, not one, but three films to them. NATURE had the opportunity to find out how exactly this family captured his heart.

What were your first impressions among the elephants?

It was an amazing moment as I had never seen an African elephant before. In 1989, I went to Amboseli for the first time to film a segment for David Attenborough’s Trials of Life. The producer I was working with for that segment had known Cynthia Moss for some time and she had always wanted to go out with Cynthia to see her elephants.

So Cynthia took us out in the car into the park. In the middle of this herd of elephants, she stopped her car, turned off the engine and she just started to talk about this family of elephants. This was not Echo’s family by the way. But Cynthia just started describing each of these elephants. She knew each one. She just started talking to us about them as individuals. It was almost as if we were at a party and she was describing everyone to us.

What was most amazing was that we were in the middle of Amboseli National Park. We were surrounded by Kilimanjaro. It was a stunning environment. But the individual personalities of the elephants were what stood out. It was quite a revelation to me.

How was Echo selected?

The producer’s idea was to do a film like an elephant soap opera. It would be a long-term project and was actually based on the documentary Seven up! The idea was that because elephants are so long-lived, we could follow them as the years passed.

Of course the next step was deciding who to follow. That was up to Cynthia. She was studying 53 elephant families in Amboseli. But Echo’s family came up at the top of the list, mainly because Echo was the first elephant who had been darted and radio collared back in 1972. So she was one of the first elephants studied. Also, Echo and her family were relatively predictable. And she was quite a homebody, which was a good thing. We didn’t want a family who would constantly be on the move and disappear on us through the filming. We couldn’t follow along with their life events if we lost them.

How crucial did it turn out that Cynthia had chosen Echo?

Echo is a remarkable elephant. She was an extremely good choice. She was around on a regular basis virtually every day. In order for the film to work, you just can’t go off and film a replacement family. Echo’s story is the main thread of the series.

But she was also a good choice because, over the years, the most extraordinary things happened to her and her family. For instance, in 1990, I had started to film in January and very little was happening with Echo’s family. But by February, the most incredible thing happened to Echo. She gave birth to a crippled calf. It was truly an extraordinary, very rare event. And this was the only time such a birth had been documented. And then we were able to film the most incredible events after that. We filmed them sleeping. We filmed the kidnapping.

What was Echo and her family’s perception of you?

It’s hard to know. I think there may have been an element of knowing that if we were around, there was a safety aspect. I think they accepted us as part of the family. Elephants have this extraordinary and complicated greeting display — they use this to greet each other when they’ve been apart. And occasionally, Echo actually greeted our car when we arrived. She would make a terrific greeting with the car. We spent so much time with her in that car; she must have recognized the style of the car.

Why are there misconceptions of elephants being raging creatures?

I think there is a misconception about elephants. And the incidents of elephant rage come from elephants in a disturbed population or in conflict with people. I’ve found that if you give them the benefit of the doubt, they are not generally an aggressive species. They are naturally gentle and trusting. When you betray that trust, they get aggressive. I’ve seen that with tourists. They drive fast. They rev up their engines. They act inappropriately. Some of this is to get a reaction from the elephants. And basically it just irritates the animals. Elephants are not aggressive animals. They have been made to be aggressive. Even if they are irritated with you, they will give you some warning. They are not like rhinos who just charge without warning and flatten you. If they do, there’s a historical reason — or a serious threat.

Do you think elephants can recognize people and understand their intentions?

I think they identify individuals. It is so hard to quantify though. Some scientists might be cynical. They would say you need real data. If you spend a lot of time with a particular animal — like I do with elephants — you will get a sense of what they’re thinking. There is a level of understanding with spending so much time with animals.

One of the things with filming elephants is you have to be able to anticipate behavior. You have to understand what they’re going to do. Not just acting on instinct. They are actually making a decision. I’ve seen instances of elephants having a discussion and clearly two elephants are disagreeing. And then one makes a decision and the other follows that. It is very interesting to watch. In order to know that, you have to know the individual. You have to have spent a lot of time with them.

How long are you out there shooting to document the life of an elephant family?

Each of the three Echo films took eight months to shoot. During those eight months, I would be out from dawn to dusk every day. Ideally one would film longer but budgets and other restrictions limit you. But of course, the longer amount of time you spend out there, the more likely you will capture unique events because we are actually distilling small bits of their behavior.

What was it like to be a character in this film?

It gave me the opportunity to tell people how I felt about elephants. Usually when you make a film, you have a narrator who is not involved in the film telling the story to the audience. But with this film, I had the chance to tell the story. It was quite nice to tell audiences that I’ve been with these elephants for 20 years. I’ve spent a lot of time with them. I know these animals. And this is how I feel about them. Of course it is slightly unnerving to put yourself on the line. But I had the benefit of expressing sentiments that scientists can’t.

Will there be another Echo film?

It’s an ongoing story. I don’t feel like I’ve completed the filming because these animals are so complex. I still look forward to spending time with them. We’re learning more about them all the time. They communicate on such complex levels, and we’re only scratching the surface. We’re sure to discover so much more. The more people understand about elephants, the more people understand how much they’re worth conserving.

Are elephants your favorite animals?

No doubt. They would have to be. I’ve done a lot of filming of primates as well. But elephants continue to surprise me. There is just so much more to learn.

We have seen them dressed in costumes and dancing at circuses, living solitary lives at zoos or giving our children a thrill with a ride on their back. But the largest land animals live a life that is completely foreign to us when left to their own in the wild — one complete with battles and births, kidnappings and camaraderie. More than fifteen years ago, Martyn Colbeck began to document in film and photos the lives of African elephants. For the better part of two decades, he has grown particularly close to the elephant matriarch, Echo, and her close-knit family, who have never failed to astonish, amuse, and inspire him.

The family seems to accept Colbeck into their world, and perhaps even considers him one of their own. The result is that he can record unimpeded the gentle love, and tight bonds that elephants feel for each other. Colbeck’s film gives us a glimpse into the complex world of elephant society. We meet Echo and begin to understand the importance of such a majestic matriarch to her devoted clan. He shows us their language and ways of communication. And he captures remarkable scenes such as the rare birth of a crippled calf that the family desperately and collectively tries to help to its feet. The film causes us to question if this could be about more than simply survival. Is there a deeper emotion we have just been privileged enough to witness through Colbeck’s lens?

In scene after moving scene, Colbeck makes us fall in love with Echo, Erin, Enid, Ely, and the rest of this loving family. He conveys through his film and in a special interview with NATURE what complicated, powerful, tender, funny — and, yes, unforgettable — creatures elephants are.

To order a copy of Unforgettable Elephants, please visit the NATURE Shop.

Online content for Unforgettable Elephants was originally posted April 2007.

In a Tanzanian jungle, a scientist and a medicine man follow a chimpanzee in search of a cure for a deadly disease. On the plains of Kenya, a woman learns a powerful lesson about family — from a pair of elephants. And in the Florida Keys, an eight-year old boy with a genetic illness utters his first words, for a chance to swim with dolphins.

From the ancient world to the modern, human lives have been influenced by animals in matters that reach far beyond the food chain. Wisdom of the Wild illustrates some of the surprising ways in which animals help teach, heal, and strengthen people, in body, mind, and spirit.

To order a copy of Wisdom of the Wild, visit the NATURE Shop.

Online content for Wisdom of the Wild was originally posted December 1999.

Animals and Earthquakes
http://animalsandearthquakes.com
Learn more about scientific studies on animal behavior preceding earthquakes. Read interviews with James Berkland and Motoji Ikeya, both featured in the film.

Infrasound
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrasound
Get the lowdown on low sounds from Wikipedia.

Fauna Communications
http://www.animalvoice.com/
Learn more about Liz von Muggenthaler’s studies on animal commmunication.

Elephant Rumbles
http://www.pbs.org/saf/1308/segments/1308-2.htm
Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell, featured in the film, tests an elephant’s ability to “hear” with her feet.

Four Ears to the Ground
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1134/is_3_111/ai_84545901
Explore elephants’ abilities to “hear” and communicate with infrasound.

Hippos and Infrasound
http://acp.eugraph.com/elephetc/hippo.html
Learn how hippos communicate above and below water via infrasound.

Indonesian Tsunami Infrasound
http://www.aip.org/149th/garces.html
Listen to the infrasound generated by 2004’s Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami.

Can Animals Sense Earthquakes?
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/11/1111_031111_earthquakeanimals.html
The belief that animals can predict earthquakes has been around for centuries.

Shark’s Sixth Sense
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0BQK/is_3_10/ai_n13778822
Find out more about shark behavior prior to Hurricane Charley in August 2004.

Books:

Hickman, Pamela. ANIMAL SENSES: HOW ANIMALS SEE, HEAR, TASTE, SMELL AND FEEL. Minneapolis: Kids Can Press, 1999.

Hough, Susan Elizabeth. EARTHSHAKING SCIENCE: WHAT WE KNOW (AND DON’T KNOW) ABOUT EARTHQUAKES. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.

Ikeya, Motoji. EARTHQUAKES AND ANIMALS: FROM FOLK LEGENDS TO SCIENCE. Osaka: Osaka University, 2004.

Kaner, Etta. ANIMAL TALK: HOW ANIMALS COMMUNICATE THROUGH SIGHT, SOUND AND SMELL. Minneapolis: Kids Can Press, 2002.

O’Connell, Caitlin. THE ELEPHANT’S SECRET SENSE: THE HIDDEN LIFE OF THE WILD HERDS OF AFRICA. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007.

Tibballs, Geoff. TSUNAMI: THE MOST TERRIFYING DISASTER. New York: Carlton Books, 2005.

Turner, Matt. ASIAN ELEPHANTS (ANIMALS UNDER THREAT). New York: Heinemann Library, 2005.