Elephants have little in common with cattle, but they share with them the names for adult male (bull), adult female (cow) and juvenile (calf). Even their collective noun is the same: a herd of elephants.
Elephants, hyraxes and sea cows (dugongs and manatees) are related. Most genetic studies place the sea cows closer to elephants than the hyraxes. The aardvark was thought to be the next closest group, but recent genetic studies suggest that the perissodactyla (horses, tapirs and rhinos) are more closely related to the elephant. The common ancestor between elephants and aardvarks lived some 55 million years ago.
Unlike Asian elephants, in which only males have tusks, both male and female African elephants are tusked. However, due to the hunting pressure on tusked animals brought about by poaching for ivory, tusklessness is an increasingly common condition in African elephants.
Humans grow two sets of teeth in their lifetimes – the rootless “milk teeth” of childhood and the second, rooted set of teeth which are supposed to last into old age. With the amount of food elephants eat every day, their teeth wear down at alarming rates, and that’s why they grow not two but six sets of chewing teeth (molars) in their lifetimes. Tusks do not wear out so fast, so an elephant does not grow more than one set in its life. In fact, tusks are rootless, just like human milk teeth. However, they do continue to grow in length throughout the lifetime of the elephant, with bull elephant tusks growing especially large.
Elephants use their tusks to pry bark off trees or dig for roots, and in social encounters as an instrument of display or as a weapon.
The trunk combines both nose and upper lip and transforms them into a single powerful organ that is able to touch, grasp and smell. It is strong enough to uproot a tree, sensitive enough to pick up a pea-sized fruit from the ground, and long enough to reach foliage high in the trees. The trunk is also used to drink by sucking up water and squirting it into the mouth. Finally, elephants use their trunks for greeting, caressing, threatening, and throwing dust over the body.
The elephant’s trunk has about 15,000 muscles and it takes baby elephants quite some time to learn to master its use.
The enormous ears of elephants act as cooling devices. The gigantic earflaps (which can measure up to 2 square metres (21.5 square feet) are equipped with an intricate web of blood vessels. When the animal flaps its ears, the blood temperature lowers by as much as 5 degrees celsius (9 degrees fahrenheit).
Wrinkles are related to the need for these large animals to keep their body temperature down. Wrinkles increase the surface area, so there is more skin to wet when the animal bathes. All the cracks and crevices trap moisture, which then takes much longer to evaporate. Thus, a wrinkly elephant keeps cooler for longer than it would with smooth skin.
An adult elephant will drink about 225 litres of water in 24 hours, and this can sometimes be drunk during a single visit to water. Each trunkful may amount to between 4-8 litres.
Elephants spend about three-quarters of their time, day and night, selecting, picking, preparing, and eating food. An adult elephant in the wild will eat in the region of 100 to 200 kg (220 to 440 lb) of vegetation in 24 hours depending on the habitat and the size of the elephant. They are herbivores (plant eaters), but they cannot digest cellulose, the substance that makes up much plant matter.
The number of plant species eaten by any one elephant may vary but it is likely to be more than fifty. About 30-60% of an elephant’s diet is grass, if it is available. Like humans and apes, an elephant’s choice of food plants will be determined partly by what grows locally, partly by what was learned from its mother, and partly by what it has discovered by trying novel food items. Elephants also select their meals taking into account the time it takes to prepare each mouthful. Eating long grass is probably the easiest and quickest way for an elephant to fill up! On the other hand, one of the most time-consuming food items for elephants to prepare is bark. With larger trees, the elephant drives a tusk between the bark and the sapwood and then yanks a strip off the tree with its trunk. The soft wood of some trees such as the baobab is also eaten. Such tusking sometimes destroys the whole tree.
Elephants normally sleep for a few hours before dawn and again during the heat of the day.
Elephants can give birth at any time of the year, and if food is plentiful all year round. In areas where food is scarce during dry seasons, most births occur during rainy seasons. This ensures that the mother has plenty to eat while she is suckling her calf.
A female between 14 and 45 years old may give birth to one calf approximately every four years with the mean interbirth intervals increasing to five years by aged 52 and six years by aged 60. Interbirth intervals of up to 13 years may occur depending upon habitat conditions and population densities. The mean calving interval varies from population to population, with high density populations or otherwise nutritionally stressed populations exhibiting longer intervals between births.
After 22 months growing inside its mother’s womb, a new-born baby elephant weighs more than the average adult human being. Female calves weigh 90-100 kg (198 – 221 lb). Males are heavier and weigh up to 120 kg (265 lb).
An adult bull savanna elephant can have a shoulder height of 3.3 metres (11 feet), weigh up to 7,500 kg (16,538 lb) and reach a length of 9 metres (30 feet). Females are smaller, weighing up to 3,232 kg (7,127 lb) and measuring 2.6 metres (8.7 feet) at shoulder height.
Elephants are unusual among mammals in that they continue to grow throughout their life, although their rate of growth slows after they reach sexual maturity.
Elephant home ranges vary from population to population and habitat to habitat. Individual home ranges vary from 15 to 3,700 square kilometres (24-5,958 square miles).
Elephants are not territorial although they utilize specific home areas during particular times of the year.
Elephants communicate with each other in many ways and with all their senses. They rely less on their eyes than humans do but visual signals are important and the position of their ears and trunks show what mood they are in. Their sense of smell can tell them something about another elephant’s health or sexual condition. Touch can also be used to convey some information. However, the main way an elephant communicates deliberately is by sound. Elephant vocalizations range from high-pitched squeaks to deep rumbles, two-thirds of which are emitted at a frequency too low for the human ear to detect. Such low-frequency calls may be heard by other elephants at distances of at least eight kilometres.
Recent studies also show that foot stomping and low rumbling emitted by elephants generate seismic waves in the ground that can travel up to 30 km (nearly 20 miles) along the Earth’s surface. Elephants may be able to sense these vibrations through their feet and interpret them as warning signals of a distant danger. They may therefore be communicating at much farther distances than previously thought.
Elephants do have remarkable memories. In the wild, elephants appear to remember for years the relationships with dozens (perhaps hundreds) of other elephants, some of whom they may see only occasionally. They also have an impressive memory for places to drink and to find food. This information gets passed on from generation to generation.
Elephants live in a social hierarchy dominated by older females. Females travel in long-lasting social units of about half a dozen adult females and their offspring, with the unit being led by a single older female, the matriarch.
To test the importance of the age of the female leader of the individual units, researchers from the University of Sussex, UK, the Institute of Zoology in London, UK, and the Amboseli Elephant Research Project in Kenya used high-powered hi-fi equipment to play back the sounds of elephant calls. Calls from complete elephant strangers prompted the mothers to cluster around their young defensively, while familiar calls were ignored. The units, led by the oldest matriarchs with the most experience, were best able to distinguish between friends and those that might present problems by harassing calves or starting disputes.
If these key individuals cannot immediately distinguish between potential threats, their families may spend too much time being defensive and not enough time reproducing. Scientists found the age of the matriarch to be a significant predictor of the number of calves produced by the family per female reproductive year.
Males do not maintain long-term social bonds, remaining in the unit only into their teens. They then live out their lives in loose bachelor groups or wandering on their own until they wish to find a female to be with briefly to mate.
An elephant can live up to 70 years. When an elephant dies of old age the cause of death is often hunger as the sixth set of molars wears out.
African elephants can be found in the following countries:
Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, South Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
The largest populations are found in southern, eastern and central Africa.
Yes. Africa is home to both the African bush or savanna elephant (Loxodonta africana) and the African forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis). The former is found predominantly in southern and eastern Africa, the latter predominantly in central and West Africa. DNA analysis has shown there are exceptions to this division. Hybridization between forest and savanna elephants occurs but appears to be infrequent.
The forest elephant can be distinguished from the savanna elephant by its smaller body size, smaller ears, and its straighter, downward – projecting tusks. The savanna elephant is larger with bigger ears, bigger more curved tusks and a distinctive concave-shaped back.
The forest elephant species is more elusive and often difficult to see, especially in the dense rainforests of central and West Africa. They are classified as critically endangered on the IUCN Red List. The savanna elephant inhabits a range of ecosystems from deserts, grassy plains, bushland, swamps, woodlands, and forests. This species is classified as endangered on the IUCN Red List.