It explains how groups of elephants can stay in touch with one another when they're miles apart. In water, infrasound can travel farther than the widest ocean basin, enabling fin whales to find each other halfway around the world. Elephants, whales, hippos, and alligators, and probably many other species, can create and hear infrasounds below the threshold of human hearing. Bats and dolphins use a form of sonar, known as echolocation, to probe their worlds with beams of sounds: sounds we can't hear. More than half a century later, scientists are beginning to explore whole worlds of sensation outside of human experience. "In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear." When this century was still young, he reached this conclusion in his book, The Outermost House: "We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals," he wrote. He watched the life at the edge of the sea near his Cape Cod home. How could these things be? For decades, scientists were baffled, but Henry Beston, not a scientist but a naturalist, knew something. From around the world, all the fin whales know to come here, this year, to breed. Fin whales, unlike other migratory whales, don't return to traditional wintering grounds year after year. When elephants were being slaughtered in one area in Zimbabwe, in a different area other elephants grew restless, flapping ears, swinging trunks, pacing, as if they knew what was happening to the other elephants miles away.Īnother mystery. Living on Earth commentator Sy Montgomery has been exploring this hidden world. Animals have some astonishing powers that we humans are only beginning to understand.
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