Birds twitter. Cats meow. Dogs bark. And elephants…rumble.

It’s one of the most curious corners of the biophony – the low-frequency noise (on the lower edge of our own hearing) that elephants send into the ground to attract a mate. The vibration is picked up by potential partners through their forelegs, and from there it’s transmitted to a bone in their middle ear (here’s the science of it – pdf). Amazingly, this may work over distances of up to 6 miles. It’s only one …

Tags: acoustics , animals , biophony , conservation , environment , natural world , science , technology

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Hundreds of years ago, it used to eat the bottoms of sailing ships. Now, it could help keep the bio-energy industry afloat.

It’s called the gribble. A marine isopod with a taste for wood (think woodlouse), the four-spotted variety called Limnoria quadripunctata used to burrow through the hulls of wooden ships, causing no end of grief for medieval sailors. In fact, lore holds Christopher Columbus was stranded in Jamaica for a year after his ship suffered a particularly nasty gribbling.

But gribbles have just made the transition from pest to scientific …

Tags: biofuel , energy , natural world , nature , news , science , sustainable

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