Joyce Hatheway Poole (born 1 May 1956) is a biologist, ethologist, conservationist, and co-founder/scientific director of ElephantVoices. She is a world authority on elephant reproductive, communicative, and cognitive behavior. Poole graduated from Smith College in 1979 with a degree in biological sciences and received her PhD in animal behavior from the University of Cambridge in 1982. She began her research with Cynthia Moss in Amboseli in 1975, focusing on male elephants, which culminated in her Cambridge dissertation on the sexual and aggressive phenomenon of musth in male elephants, entitled, Musth and male-male competition in the African elephant. In the mid-1980s Poole and Katherine (Katy) Payne worked together in Amboseli studying elephant vocal communication. This collaboration led to the discovery that African elephants use powerful, very low frequency calls to communicate with one another over long distances. Poole has worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University, head of the Elephant Program at Kenya Wildlife Service, and Scientific Director of ElephantVoices, which she co-founded with husband Petter Granli in 2002. Over decades Poole has been a vocal advocate for elephant conservation and welfare. She has received several awards for her work, including the Smith College Medal and Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award.
Early life Poole was born in Germany in 1956 to American parents, Robert Keyes Poole and Julie Ann Hatheway. Her father, a graduate of Yale, 1954, began his career teaching history at the Taft School. From there he was recruited in 1962 to join the US Peace Corps as country director first in Malawi and then in Kenya. In the early 1970s he initiated and ran the Smithsonian Peace Corp Environmental Program and then returned to Kenya to head the African offices of the African Wildlife Foundation. Poole's mother graduated from Smith College, 1954, and held numerous volunteer positions in Africa and the United States throughout her life. Poole has a brother, Emmy Award Winning nature cinematographer, Robert (Bob) C. Poole and a sister, Virginia H. Poole, who holds a PhD in health services research from the Department of Health Policy and Management at Johns Hopkins University. Poole spent the first six years of her life in Connecticut at the Taft School, where her father was teaching. With her family Poole moved first to Malawi in 1962 and then to Kenya in 1965, where she grew up spending holidays in the national parks. At the age of six while on safari in Amboseli National Park, Kenya, their car was charged by a bull elephant. This made an impression on her. In 1966, when she was 11 years old, she went to one of primatologist Jane Goodall's lectures on her research with chimpanzees, and made a determination to become an animal behavior researcher.
Career Poole began her career in 1975, working with Cynthia Moss in Amboseli, where she focused on male African elephants. Her early observations led to her discovery of musth, a period of heightened reproductive activity and aggression, in African elephants. Her long-term documentation described the physical and behavioral characteristics and temporal patterning of musth among individual males, as well as the role of musth and longevity in reproductive success. In the mid-1980s Poole pursued postdoctoral research at Princeton University, working under Daniel Rubenstein. During this time, she continued her studies on the behavior of musth males while concurrently beginning to study elephant acoustic communication. During this period, she collaborated with Payne, leading to the discovery that the low frequency rumble vocalizations of African elephants contain infrasonic frequencies, below the range of human hearing. They postulated that elephants use powerful rumbles to communicate with one another over long distances. In 1990, she became the head of the Elephant Program for the Kenya Wildlife Service, where she worked for four years. She played a pivotal role in developing and implementing elephant conservation and management policies across the country and in training a team of young Kenyan elephant conservationists. During the mid-1990s, Poole worked as a consultant for various organizations, including Richard Leakey & Associates, the World Bank, and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Her efforts were focused on advising, training, and raising awareness about elephant conservation. Additionally, she wrote a memoir Coming of Age with Elephants, published in 1996. In 2002, she co-founded ElephantVoices with her husband Granli, with the mission "to inspire wonder in the intelligence, complexity and voices of elephants, and to secure a kinder future for them". In 2008, ElephantVoices was registered as a non-profit 501(c)3 organization in California dedicated to elephant research, conservation, education and advocacy. Poole co-developed the Elephant Charter, outlining principles for the ethical treatment of elephants. Poole and Granli also designed citizen science projects and digital tools that allowed people to submit observations of individual elephants through the use of customized apps to online databases. Among notable initiatives were the Elephant Partners project in the Maasai Mara ecosystem, and the Gorongosa Elephant Project in Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, each with dedicated Who's Who & Whereabouts Databases and related smartphone apps as scientific tools, which enabled access to life history, social and locational information on individual elephants. Through their work at ElephantVoices, in 2021 Poole and Granli launched a fully searchable comprehensive Elephant Ethogram, a public database detailing African elephant behaviors and communication. This extensive resource, defining approximately 322 behaviors and 103 behavioral suites with written descriptions, images, sounds and over 2,400 video examples, was meticulously curated through tens of thousands of hours of field observations.
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