Amboseli

In the shadow of Kilimanjaro lies Amboseli, one of Africa’s most iconic elephant landscapes. ElephantVoices co-founder Joyce Poole carried out her early, landmark studies on musth and very low-frequency communication here, and our team continues to collaborate closely with the Amboseli Elephant Research Project. Together, these long-term studies have transformed what we know about elephant society-from musth to infrasound and beyond — reshaping elephant science and conservation.

The Amboseli Landscape The Best-Known Elephant Population Discovering Musth in African Elephants

Amboseli is a small national park in southern Kenya measuring only 392 km². The southern boundary of the park lies less than 5 km from the Tanzanian border at the base of Africa's highest mountain, snow-capped Kilimanjaro. The name Amboseli comes from the Maasai name, Empusel. The park lies within a Pleistocene lake basin, formed when lava flow from an erupting Kilimanjaro blocked the course of the Pangani River, creating a lake. Over time the lake dried, though the western part of the basin still floods seasonally to form Lake Amboseli. The flat terrain is punctuated by small extinct volcanic vents — Lemomo, Ositeti, Kitirua, Ilmberishari, and Nomatior — while the land rises toward Kilimanjaro in the south.

In the early days ID photos were selected from contact sheets, printed and pasted on an index card with the elephant's name and family. This is Jezebel who was matriarch of the JA family

The Amboseli Elephant Research Project is the world’s longest-running study of elephants and represents an unparalleled body of knowledge on the life history and behavior of African elephants. Since 1972, researchers have followed the lives of individually known elephants in remarkable detail. Documented in scientific journals, popular books, and global media, the Amboseli elephants are the most celebrated in the world.

The Amboseli ecosystem covers about 5,000 km2 and is currently home to some 2,000 elephants.Each elephant has been named, numbered, or coded and can be recognized individually. Detailed photographic recognition cards exist for every adult and most juveniles over seven years old, while calves are identified through their families. This unique level of recognition makes the Amboseli population the best-known elephant population on Earth.

For over five decades, the elephants of Amboseli have been spared the widespread scourge of ivory poaching. It is one of the few populations in which animals span the whole age range from newborn calves to wise old matriarchs in their late 60s, and more unusually, many large breeding males in their 40s, 50s and even 60s.

ElephantVoices co-founder Joyce Poole joined the Amboseli project in 1975 and conducted research there until 1990, when she became head of the Elephant Program at the Kenya Wildlife Service. Her early work focused on male elephant behavior, leading to the groundbreaking discovery of discovery of Musth in the African elephant with Cynthia Moss — published in Nature in 1982.

Her PhD at Cambridge University and postdoctoral research at Princeton University explored the behavior and temporal patterns of musth and its role in male life histories. Joyce’s findings revealed that older, not younger, males are the primary breeders — countering long-held assumptions by trophy hunters that older bulls were “reproductively senile.”

Discovering Infrasonic Communication in Elephants

While studying musth vocalizations, Joyce suspected elephants might produce sounds below human hearing. This led to collaboration with Katy Payne, who had had similar suspicions about Asian elephants. After Katy’s discovery that Asian elephants are capable of producing infrasound, Joyce invited her to come to Amboseli. Together, they recorded and confirmed that African elephants, too, produce infrasound in their very low-frequency rumbles and showed that these are used across a range of social contexts. This landmark study, published in 1988, changed our understanding of elephant communication.

In 1989 Joyce took a break from her communication study to carry out a series of surveys on some of East Africa’s most heavily poached elephants populations - Tsavo in Kenya, Mikumi in Tanzania and Queen Elizabeth in Uganda. She compared data on age and family structure, sex ratios and rates of tusklessness to the relatively protected Amboseli population - showing the immense impact that the killing for ivory was having on elephant society. She published her results as a paper in Oryx and as a report to the Convention on international Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) about the ivory trade. Working together with the Government of Tanzania these data were also incorporated into the country’s proposal to CITES, which helped to place the African elephant on Appendix I and ban the international trade in ivory.

After heading the Elephant Program at Kenya Wildlife Service in the early 1990s, Joyce returned to Amboseli between 1997-2009 to study elephant communication. She was often accompanied by her young daughter, Selengei, who first visited Amboseli at the age of four months. The Elephant Research Camp became her playground and the field vehicle her jungle-gym. Spending time in Amboseli at such a young age instilled in her a deep love for Africa and for elephants.

Discovering Vocal Imitation in Elephants

In 1998, the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust invited Joyce to record the orphaned elephants in Tsavo. There she made the extraordinary discovery that elephants are capable of vocal learning - imitating the sounds of other species and even machines. This work published in Nature in 2005 with colleagues Angela Stöeger, Peter Tyack and Stephanie Watwood, revealed another layer of elephant intelligence and flexibility.

Studying Echo’s Family & Founding ElephantVoices

In 1999 Joyce met Petter Granli, who she was to marry in 2002. Joining forces they focused their study of elephant communication on the EB family, led by the famed matriarch, Echo, collecting a large sample size of calls given by known individuals in known contexts. It was during this time that Petter and Joyce founded ElephantVoices, first as a website in 2002 and then as an NGO in 2008.

ElephantVoices continued to collaborate closely with the Amboseli Elephant Research Project, contributing five chapters (Male Social Dynamics; Longevity, Competition and Musth; Signals, Gestures and Behaviors; Behavioral Contexts of Elephant Acoustic Communication; and Ethical Approaches to Elephant Conservation) to the 2011 Amboseli book, The Amboseli Elephants: A long-term perspective on a long-lived mammal, which drew on Joyce’s decades of Amboseli research.

Between 2010 and 2019 Joyce and Petter worked in the Maasai Mara, Kenya and in Gorongosa, Mozambique (see the pages on these two studies). In 2020, they returned to Amboseli to film elephant behavior and record their vocalizations for inclusion in The Elephant Ethogram: A Library of African Elephant Behavior.

Explore The Elephant Ethogram

Joyce Poole

In 2023 and 2024 trophy hunters in Tanzania began to target mature male elephants from Amboseli’s cross-border population, killing five individuals with massive tusks. ElephantVoices, the Amboseli Trust for Elephants, the Big Life Foundation and others joined forces to halt the killing. The effort included placing a satellite collar on Esau, one of Amboseli’s well known super-tuskers who spends part of his time in Tanzania. See our multi-author Letter to Science Stop elephant hunting in the Tanzania borderlands.

Long-term collaboration with Dr. Mickey Pardo led to another remarkable finding. Using machine learning, Mickey used our Amboseli and his Samburu recordings of known individuals to show that elephants create and use names for one another. We had long suspected that elephants were addressing specific individuals with their contact calls, but it was Mickey’s careful analysis that led to this breakthrough. African elephants address one another with individually specific name-like calls was published in Nature Ecology and Evolution. A second study using the same dataset found clear evidence for vocal distinctiveness between individual elephants and between the two populations and subtler indications of differences between social groups within a population.

Read about elephant names