Katy Payne, 2004 Women of Discovery Earth Award

"From Ghandi, 'The means may be likened to a seed, and the end to a tree; and there is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree.'" — Katy Payne

Acoustic Biologist

Born: 1937-01-01

Hometown: Ithaca, NY

Education: BA with honors, Music

Achievements

Discoveries: The infrasonic communication of elephants and the changing songs of humpback whales

Expeditions: Argentina, Revillagigedos Islands, Kenya, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Central African Republic

Biography

 Katy Payne is a Research Associate in the Bioacoustics Research Program of Cornell University's Laboratory of Ornithology. She started her studies of animal communication with a fifteen-year study of the constantly changing songs of humpback whales -- a fascinating example of cultural evolution. Then in 1984, Payne and two associates discovered that elephants make infrasonic calls that lie below the range of human hearing and travel exceptionally well. Since then, she and a shifting array of associates have focused on long-distance communication in African elephants in Kenya, Namibia, and Zimbabwe. Their studies show that elephants' powerful low-frequency calls function in mate attraction and probably in family coordination over distances whose outer limits vary between four and ten kilometers and are highly dependent on atmospheric conditions. In 1999, Payne started a conservation-oriented initiative called the Elephant Listening Project (ELP), whose purpose is to develop an acoustic monitoring program for forest elephants. Because of the density of trees in their equatorial rainforest habitats, most forest elephant populations cannot be censused visually. Forest elephants belong to a separate species, Loxodonta cyclotis, which is doubly endangered by forest destruction and by current political trends. In two intensive field seasons focused on a unique population that predictably visits a forest clearing in the Central African Republic, the ELP team used video recordings and an acoustic array to document the extent to which calling behavior reflects the elephants' numbers and circumstances. The results of this effort are now nearly ready to be put to use in the service of conservation because of the simultaneous development of new hardware and software for automatic detection and analysis of large sets of animal sounds. Gradually, the Bioacoustics Research Program engineers and biologists participating in this project are yielding a relatively simple and inexpensive, non-invasive process which will enable rangers to assess the size and health of forest elephant populations on the basis of their calls. The same data provide an opening into a deeper understanding of elephants' call repertoire and the ways in which each kind of call contributes to the social structure and welfare of elephant communities. Payne is the author of "Silent Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants" (1998) and "Elephants Calling" (1992), a children's book.

(Biography from the The Elephant Listening Project http://www.birds.cornell.edu/brp/elephant/ELPKatybio.html)

Fun Facts