Rather than wasting time, funds and personnel in attempts to canvas entire jungles for an elephant census, researchers are simply setting up microphones. This bioacoustic monitoring technique is similar to what has been used in the past, on a smaller scale, to count birds, but in this case it’s covering hundreds of square kilometres.

Researchers prepared by manually counting elephants and observing the sounds they make in order to create a system to interpret the sounds captured by the jungle microphones. It must’ve been a tedious bit of preparation, but if the alternative is “dung survey transects”, I think those folks were more than happy to do it. [Elephant Listening Project via Wired]

Photo by exfordy

And, as an elephant, she weighs three tons. That kind of weight&mdas;excuse me for saying so, ma’am—requires one strong prosthesis. It took a few years of work to get right.

In the interim, Motola was forced to use a temporary prosthesis. This was completely unbecoming of her status as a respected 48-year-old pachyderm.

But she was patient, and today she took her first steps. They were a success. To celebrate the occasion, Motola sucked up some dirt and blew it skyward like dusty fireworks. She has some work to do, but the limb held her massive frame, and she’ll hopefully be walking with some semblance of normalcy for the rest of her days.

We can rebuild her. They did rebuild her. Motola: The Million Dollar Elephant. [SFGate]

…it was dunked in mud, put inside a 300 degree oven, and soaked in beer. What finally did it in is being crushed by a three ton forklift, which is pretty above and beyond the duty of any phone we’d normally use.

As for the specs, it has 1500 hours of battery (standby or talk, we’re not sure) and a 2-megapixel camera. And, most notably, it has an “extra loud” ringtone so you can hear it under elephants. [Telegraph via Slashdot]

And yes, the photographer and videographer apparently had no idea. [National Geographic via Neatorama]

The whole thing has a Dalí feeling mixed with a crisp, industrial punk feeling that is completely irresistible. At least for me, anyway. [Baekdal and Andrew Chase via Book of Joe]

Pachyderm rescue group Save the Elephants started the scheme up after five elephants who refused to stop raiding crops had to be shot by the Kenya Wildlife Service. The project, still in its infancy, is expensive to implement and not without its troubles. But it’s already saved the life of one regular crop fiend, a bull named Kimari who’s been intercepted 15 times since he was first connected. [Daily Mail via Switched]