When gov't "solutions" are simplistic, uncreative, and trip over obvious truths
Image by Daniel Foster
Elephants have always communicated with their feet (via bone conduction), but it took awhile for scientists to catch on—to see what was right in front of them. When it comes to local issues like housing and transit, we wonder if pols have fallen into a similar trap. From Discourse mag.
They were always there; we just never noticed them. They surrounded us in the natural world, in the forests and the jungles. In some cases, they were literally right beneath our feet. ... So why did we overlook them for so long? It’s not because we lacked the tools; it’s that our attention has been focused elsewhere. We failed to plumb the negative spaces—the less obvious realms where deep connections often lie. ...
Something was wrong with the elephants. They were agitated, frantic, disturbed. Some seemed to flee in terror. The humans had no idea why. Soon it would be painfully clear. On Dec. 26, 2004, the second-most-powerful earthquake in recorded history erupted off the northern coast of Sumatra, triggering a tsunami that killed more than 227,000 people. Yet surprisingly few animals lost their lives.
Before the waves came crashing in, dogs refused to go to the beach. Flamingos flew off for higher ground. Zoo animals rushed inside their shelters. ... How had they sensed the impending disaster?
For millennia, humans have interacted with elephants without noticing their communications with each other. In 218 B.C., Hannibal famously led an army over the Alps with elephants in its ranks. South Asians have long harnessed them for labor. In 1883, P.T. Barnum marched them across the Brooklyn Bridge. And as Jacob Shell details in his book “Giants of the Monsoon Forest,” the Japanese Army enlisted them to help build the “Railway of Death” in World War II.
Although scientists have studied them in the wild, no one managed to observe the signals they were sending. That’s partly because while elephants communicate over vast distances by emitting low-pitched rumbles, these rumbles exist below the range of human hearing.
Nonetheless, it was still possible to glean clues about their connections through simple observation. It took Caitlin O’Connell, a postdoctoral researcher who lived among elephants, to see what no one else had: They were hearing through their feet. ...
From such long and close-up cohabitation, she noticed that elephants possessed an amazing ability to, in essence, tiptoe. Once, she watched a herd, startled by a sound of approaching predators, simultaneously turn and race into the forest, while barely making a sound. They appeared to be elevated on their toes. She also noticed that elephants often stood motionless, leaning forward and digging their toenails into the ground. O’Connell wondered if they might be doing something similar to the insects she had previously studied: detecting seismic signals—sound waves transmitted through the earth. In the elephants’ case, the vibrations might be picked up via bone conduction.
O’Connell’s hunch took years of elaborate experiments to explore. Eventually ... her initial hypothesis proved correct. Today, we recognize that elephants hear through their feet using bone conduction, as well as through their ears. They can hear each other’s trumpet calls from roughly two miles away, but they can detect each other’s rumbles through the earth at up to twice that distance.
If herds of elephants have always been communicating with each other over kilometers, why did it take us so long to notice? The signals were always there for us to feel. We heard their trumpet calls; we could not have missed those if we tried. But then we stopped wondering what else might connect them. We accepted what was right in front of us, and we failed to imagine anything more.
Read the whole thing here.
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