A herd of elephants quickly huddled during a 5.2-magnitude earthquake that shook San Diego county on April 14.
The earthquake struck Julian, California, and was felt across San Diego county near 10 a.m. PT, along with other neighboring counties, the U.S. Geological Survey said. Seven aftershocks were also reported by the USGS.
Amid the earth-shaking incident, the African elephants at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park quickly rushed to protect their young, as seen from footage captured and shared by the Escondido-based park on social media.
The video shows five elephants in their enclosure before the camera starts shaking. They scramble and the three older elephants — Ndlula, 25, Umngani, 35, and Khosi, 18, known as “the babysitter of the herd” — encircle and shield the younger calves Zuli, 7, and Mkhaya, 7.
“Circle of trust,” the video is captioned, before explaining that elephants have a “unique ability to feel sounds through their feet and formed what is known as an ‘alert circle.’”
In additional footage shared with TODAY.com, the elephants stayed alert, with the smallest one in the middle and the rest looking out in a circle. Over three minutes go by and they began to walk away in the same direction, but remained close together.
This behavior, the park wrote, “is a natural response to perceived threats that helps protect younger elephants and the herd as a whole.”
Mindy Albright, curator of mammals at the Safari Park, tells TODAY.com that elephants have a remarkable sense of hearing.
“Something that’s really unique is that they can feel vibration through their feet, and they can communicate in a frequency far below our ability to hear, very low frequency sounds,” Albright, whose specialty is elephant behavior, says. “Those low frequency sounds have the ability to travel a much farther distance. So it’s a way for them to communicate from herd to herd.”
The elephants, she says, quickly picked up on the abnormal environment and their first line of defense was to form the alert circle.
“You’ve got big elephants facing outward, (so) it’s very hard for a predator or something that’s scary to do any harm to them,” Albright explains. “One of the other things that they’ll do is they’ll put their calves in the middle of that circle and that lets them each take a turn facing a different direction, paying attention to the environment around them to see if they can see what caused that alarm and potential harm.”
Albright notes that once in the circle, the elephants in the video continue to touch one another with their trunks, “Kind of just checking each other out, like, ‘Are you OK?’”
She says, at one point, the young male calf Zuli sticks his truck up, smelling the air, “Probably trying to figure out what was that and where did it come from.”
Albright says the elephants resumed their normal activity following the earthquake, which she describes as “long.” “It wasn’t just a quick little shake, it kept going.”
Eventually, she says, the elephants slowly returned to the habitat to continue eating and finding treats in the trees when they felt safe.
“This was a really unique moment because we have all these cameras around their habitats, which allow us to monitor the elephants,” Albright says. “It was neat to see how quickly they responded.”
Albright adds that what makes this moment extra special is how much they care about protecting one another, showcasing how elephants are relatable to people.
“It solidifies the importance of the family unit and that they all have a unified goal of protecting their calves,” Albright says. “The two adult females, who are not related, still come together as a group to protect their young.”
“They knew something was not right, and they came together and they were appropriate in their response,” Albright says. “I think it’s something that we can all relate to; it was kind of scary and the first thing you want to do is check on your family members to make sure everybody’s OK — and that’s exactly what they did.”
