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I expect a lot of things from Disney, but science isn’t one of them. Well, I should amend that statement. Disney’s known for innovation in artistic fields, and sometimes that bleeds into the sciences with the architectural and other advances made by the Imagineers or at Pixar/the Animation Studio. But I never expect to hear of new scientific discoveries made, and published in professional scientific journals, by Disney employees.
That’s just what happened this past year, however, as scientists from Disney’s Animal Kingdom teamed up with Oxford University and the zoological group Save the Elephants to study a herd of African elephants.
Wired Magazine UK reports that a group of researchers, among them Dr. Joseph Soltis of Disney’s Animal Kingdom, traveled to the Samburu and Buffalo Springs National Reserves in Kenya to observe the interactions of elephant families in the wild.
There they discovered a new sound that elephants make, one designed to warn the pack about a specific threat. When elephants overhear the angry buzzing of bees, they make a rumbling sound and flee from the area while shaking their heads. In their report published in the scientific journal PLoS One, the scientists suggested that the shaking of heads and throwing around of dust was meant to “knock bees away…lower[ing] the risk of being stung.”
Zoologists already knew that elephants had a warning noise for the approach of humans. They also knew that elephants run from the area if they accidentally disturb a beehive. But this is the first time they’ve discovered that elephants have a specific noise meant to warn the pack about bees.
Once the researching group discovered the elephants’ reaction to the sound of bees, they reproduced the warning rumbling sound the elephants made and played it to see if it would elicit a reaction. It did, with the majority of the elephant families leaving the area when they heard a reproduction of their own bee warning noise (caught on video here).
Disney’s Dr. Joseph Soltis sums up the implications of their discovery, telling Wired that “the calls give tantalizing clues that elephants may produce different sounds in the same way that humans produce different vowels, by altering the position of their tongues and lips. It’s even possible that, rather like with human language, this enables them to give superficially similar-sounding calls very different meanings.”
Reading about these types of discoveries only fuels my desire to visit Disney’s Animal Kingdom. I mean, it was always the perfect place for me: I love Disney, and I love animals. I always knew that Disney would employ top-notch people to look after their animals. But I never realized that their employees were also researchers, making new discoveries out in the field.
I’m sure it looks good for Disney to have people on staff publishing studies in scientific journals. It makes them look all the more serious and professional. But I still think it’s cool of them to help fund research in a field not really related to their company at all. Here’s hoping we’ll get to learn of more Disney-supported neat nature news stories like this in the future.
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*(This image by Quadell is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.)
