What do you do when you're there? I have this kind of vision of you with headphones on and a little microphone creeping up behind elephants, but I'm sure it's not, [laughs] it's not like that.

Yeah, so, so when I was there just a week ago, I, I wasn't actually collecting data.

Um, I was just, just there to help, uh, train some of the staff and to bring some, uh, some equipment and stuff like that.

But, um, generally, when I'm recording elephants in the field, uh, we record them from a vehicle, so we don't approach them on foot.

We approach them in a vehicle, which they're habituated to, so they don't really react very strongly to our vehicle, and we can get very close to them.

And then we have a microphone, um, that's capable of recording infrasound, which is sound that's below the range of human hearing.

So we can record the full spectrum of the calls, even if we're only hearing part of the call.

Uh, before we let you go, how are the elephant populations doing, uh, when it comes to, um, the herds in Africa these days?

was

both.

So the truth of the matter is the reason why I started studying acorn woodpeckers was out of necessity.

So I had started my PhD working on Asian elephants and that project didn't work out for a variety of reasons.

And so I was sort of left in like, year or two of my PhD, not really knowing what my project was going to be and being close to my candidacy exam coming up and not having a research project and being in this difficult situation.

So my advisor basically said, look, you're coming to Hastings where, where I work, you know, where my, my advisor.

So my, my advisor just to take a step back was Walt Koenig.

So how do you walk us through? How did you prove that elephants have names? And also from what my understanding, it's a little bit different from the dolphin case, right? Because correct me if I'm wrong, but dolphins kind of announced their own names.