This is Scientific Americans, 60-Second Science. I'm Karen Hopkins.

Ask anyone what an elephant sounds like, and they'll come up with something like this.

But some elephants can also do this.

And researchers using an acoustic camera that converts sounds into colors have figured

out how. The findings appear in the journal BMC Biology.

Americans actually have a few ways they can get their message across.

In addition to the traditional trumpet, they also communicate using a rumble whose

pitch is often too low for humans to hear.

But then the Asian elephant, and the Asian elephant only, produces ridiculously high

pitched squeaks.

The seem to come while the former mouse then perform an animal the size of an elephant.

Veronica Bigg of the University of Vienna. She and her colleagues set out to locate

the source of these unusual chirps.

The only idea that was out there so far was that elephants produce squeaks in the same

way as they produce the trumpets.

That is, using their trunk.

So we started out with just observing the facial movements and posture of Asian elephants

when they squeak.

First up, a group of 14 adult females at an elephant camp in Nepal.

So first we observed that elephants squeak when they are wild.

So anytime they get excited or upset.

Then they are easily upset.

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