Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin

flying bat can actually spot and classify a flying beetle from thirty feet away); dung beetles can perceive the polarization of moonlight. I know dung beetles are insects, not animals, but an insect’s brain is so tiny it makes the things their sensory system can handle even more miraculous.
    There are two things going on with extreme perception in animals: one is the different set of sense organs animals have, and the other is a different way of processing sense data in the brain. With Jane’s cat, I’m talking mostly about a different physical capacity to hear sounds humans can’t.
    There are hundreds or maybe even thousands of examples of this in the animal world, lots of which we probably still don’t know about. A good example is the silent thunder of elephants. It wasn’tuntil the 1980s that a researcher named Katy Payne, of Cornell University, figured out that elephants communicate with one another using infrasonic sound waves too low for humans to hear. 10 People who studied elephants had always wondered how elephant families managed to coordinate their movements with family members miles away. An elephant family could be split up for weeks, and then meet up at the same place at the same time. They had to be communicating with one another somehow, but they were way out of the range any human could either see or shout across.
    Katy Payne made a lucky guess about infrasonic sound when she felt “a throbbing in the air” next to the elephant cages at the Portland Zoo in Oregon. She’d had the same feeling as a child when the organ played in church. She started to think maybe the elephants were communicating with each other in a super-low range humans don’t hear. That would solve the problem of the long-distance communication, because infrasonic sound travels a lot farther than sound waves in the register humans do hear.
    She turned out to be right. Elephants “roar” out to each other below our level of hearing. During the daytime an elephant can hear another elephant calling him from at least as far away as two and a half miles. At nighttime, because of temperature inversions, that distance can go up by an order of magnitude to as much as twenty-five miles. It’s a huge distance.
    Now it turns out that elephants may be talking to one another through the ground, not just the air. Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell, a biologist at Stanford, is working on this. She believes elephants can probably use seismic communication —making the ground rumble by stomping on it—to communicate with other elephants as far away as twenty miles.
    She figured this out by watching the elephants in the Etosha National Park in Namibia. Right before another herd of elephants arrived, the elephants she was watching would start to “pay a lot of attention to the ground with their feet.” 11 They’d do things like shift their weight or lean forward, or lift a foot off the ground. They were listening.
    Dr. O’Connell-Rodwell thinks the animals are probably using the pads of their feet like the head of a drum. She and her team are alsodissecting elephant feet to see whether they have pascinian and meissner corpuscles , which are special sensors elephants have in their trunks to detect vibrations. If they find them in the feet, too, that’s pretty good evidence elephants use seismic waves to communicate. A lot of animals communicate by thumping on the ground, including skunks and rabbits, so it won’t surprise me if we find out elephants are talking to one another that way.
    If elephants do have special corpuscles to detect vibrations that would be an example of an animal species having extreme perception because they’re built differently and have different sense organs. Animals have all kinds of sense receptors we don’t. Another example: dolphins have an oil-filled sac in their foreheads, underneath their forehead bumps, that they use for sonar. The dolphin