  The elliptical instability is an instability of elliptical streamlines, which
can be excited by large-scale tidal flows in rotating fluid bodies, and excites
inertial waves if the dimensionless tidal amplitude ($\epsilon$) is
sufficiently large. It operates in convection zones but its interactions with
turbulent convection have not been studied in this context. We perform an
extensive suite of Cartesian hydrodynamical simulations in wide boxes to
explore the interactions of the elliptical instability and Rayleigh-B\'enard
convection. We find that geostrophic vortices generated by the elliptical
instability dominate the flow, with energies far exceeding those of the
inertial waves. Furthermore, we find that the elliptical instability can
operate with convection, but it is suppressed for sufficiently strong
convection, primarily by convectively-driven large-scale vortices. We examine
the flow in Fourier space, allowing us to determine the energetically dominant
frequencies and wavenumbers. We find that power primarily concentrates in
geostrophic vortices, in wavenumbers that are convectively unstable, and along
the inertial wave dispersion relation, even in non-elliptically deformed
convective flows. Examining linear growth rates on a convective background, we
find that convective large-scale vortices suppress the elliptical instability
in the same way as the geostrophic vortices created by the elliptical
instability itself. Finally, convective motions act as an effective viscosity
on large-scale tidal flows, providing a sustained energy transfer (scaling as
$\epsilon^2$). Furthermore, we find that the energy transfer resulting from
bursts of elliptical instability, when it operates, is consistent with the
$\epsilon^3$ scaling found in prior work.
