[3] Initially a researcher of whales with her then husband, Payne turned to investigating elephants after observing them at the Oregon Zoo in Portland.

In 1984, she and other researchers such as Joyce Poole discovered that elephants make infrasonic calls to one another that might be detectable at distances as far as ten kilometers.

With the help of a Navy engineer, Frank Watlington monitored hydrophones many miles into the sea to capture the sounds of the humpback whales.

[7] After four months in Portland, Cornell University's acoustic biologists Carl Hopkins and Bob Capranica partnered with Payne to record and measure the infrasonic communication and behavior of elephants.

Turkalo has identified more than 4,000 individual elephants and has tracked their family relationships, social behavior, history of visits to the clearing, and reproduction.