Research Work at Disney's Animal Kingdom

Y'know, I don't know about you, but every time I go through Living with the Land attraction, and walking through various "educational" stuff at Animal Kingdom, I always have this skepticism at all the so-called "research" work that they claim to be going on at various Disney sites. This is probably because, frankly, I haven't seen or heard about any scientific work that actually came out of such places. It doesn't help that my line of study probably has very little in common, or overlap, that I would come across such work in the journals that I read.

Well, here are a few things that have eliminated my skepticism. I found two abstracts of a contributed talk at a recent conference:

Measuring emotional arousal in the voiced sounds of two mammals, the rhesus monkey and African elephant. Joseph Soltis, Christina Wesolek, Anne Savage (
Education and Sci., Disney’s Animal Kingdom, Lake Buena Vista, FL), Kirsten Leong (
Cornell Univ., Ithaca, NY), and John Newman (
NICHD, Poolesville, MD)

Emotional arousal is expressed in the voiced sounds of primates and other mammals, but there are no consistent acoustic measures used and few comparative analyses. We apply a representative suite of source and filter measurements to rhesus macaque
Macaca mulatta coo calls onCayo Santiago, Puerto Rico, and African elephant
Loxodonta africana rumble calls at Disney’s Animal Kingdom, Florida, U.S.A. Based on social
context, calls were classified into high and low arousal categories. In both species, MANOVA showed that the 15 measures taken together separated calls across arousal categories. In rhesus macaques, high arousal was associated with increased and more variable fundamental frequencies, increased amplitudes in the lower frequencies, and a shift in formant locations. In African elephants, increased arousal was associated with a shift of energy from lower to higher frequencies. In addition, low ranking females expressed a greater magnitude of acoustic change compared to high ranking females. The suite of acoustic features used here may successfully characterize arousal state in a variety of mammals, but the specific acoustic features that reflect arousal and the specific pattern of acoustic response may vary by species and individual. Work supported by Grant Nos. NIH CM-5-P40RR003640-13 and NSF-IIS-0326395

Antiphonal exchanges in female African elephants. Katherine Leighty, Joseph Soltis, Anne Savage (Disney’s Animal Kingdom, Lake Buena Vista, FL), and Kirsten Leong (Cornell University, Ithaca, NY)

Female African elephants
Loxodonta africana engage in antiphonal exchanges of rumble vocalizations. In this study, female African elephants (N7) housed at Disney’s Animal Kingdom were outfitted with audiorecording collars and videotaped during 50 1-hour observation sessions conducted in 2002. We found that production of the antiphonal response rumble reflected changes in herd affiliation that had taken place since our
previous study
2000. Second, we examined response latency and found that females responded more quickly to the rumbles of affiliated partners than to those of a nonaffiliated female. Since affiliated partners spend more time in close proximity by definition, they may engage in higher rates of temporally associated calling simply because nearby stimuli impact them simultaneously or due to a social facilitation effect, not because they are true vocal exchanges. Therefore, we examined antiphonal rumble responses when female pairs were more than 25 m apart. We found that at these distances, affiliated females still exchanged rumbles more frequently, and responded at a decreased latency, than nonaffiliated pairs. Our results provide support for functional hypotheses of African elephant rumble vocalizations that require instances of temporally associated calling in order to be true communicative events. Work supported by Grant No. NSF-IIS- 0326395.

So yes, they DO perform scholarly work, for people like me who were skeptical!

Zz.