Calves stick close to Mom and nurse frequently they gain, on average, 1 to 1.3 kg (2 to 3 lb) a day in their first year! Herd mates tend to look out for the calves if they are in distress.Įlephants consume grasses, small plants, bushes, fruit, twigs, tree bark, and roots. The little one uses its mouth to drink its mother’s milk, so it doesn’t need a long trunk to feed. The newborn elephant is about 85 cm (33 in) tall and weighs about 120 kg (260 lb). They usually have one baby, twins are very rare.Įlephant females undergo the longest gestation period of all mammals. They tend to have a new baby every two and half to four years. The male, on the other hand, lives apart from the matriarchal herd, and travels alone or with other males in a bachelor pod.Įlephant females can have babies until they are about 50 years old. This herd sticks closely together, rejoicing at the birth of a calf and mourning at the death of a member. They are guided by the oldest and largest female of the herd. Each herd is made up of mothers, daughters, sisters and aunts. One of the main characteristics of the social order in the herd is that males and females live entirely different and separate lives.Įlephants are a matriarchal society that is, one that is led by a head cow, who presides over her herd of females. But elephants can hear these sounds up to 8 kilometers (5 miles) away.Įlephants are known for their superior intelligence as well as their structured social order. Most elephants sounds are so low, people cannot hear them. They “talk” to each other with very low sounds. Their ways of acting toward other elephants are hard for people to understand. In the wild, elephants have strong family relationship. Until Motty’s birth, it was not believed possible that interspecific elephant hybrids could occur, and none has been recorded since. The rarest elephant on record is Motty, a male calf born at Chester Zoo, England, on 11 July 1978, because he is the only known example of a hybrid between the African elephant and the Asian elephant. The oldest elephant ever was Dakshayani, an Asian elephant, who died in 2019 at the age of 88 in Kerala, India. This male weighed about 11,000 kg (24,000 lb), with a shoulder height of 3.96 meters (13 feet), a meter taller than the average male African elephant. The largest elephant ever recorded was shot in Angola in 1956. While the elephant brain is larger overall, it is proportionally smaller. The brain of an elephant weighs 4.5–5.5 kg (10–12 lb) compared to 1.6 kg (4 lb) for a human brain. It is so sensitive that it can feel a fly landing on it.Įlephant have the largest brain of any land animal, and three times as many neurons as humans. And even though it’s thick, an elephant’s skin is also very sensitive to touch and sunburn. Two species from Africa have large ears shaped like the continent of Africa while Asian species have smaller ears shaped like India.Īn elephant’s skin can be up to 2.5 centimeters (1 inch) thick on some parts of its body. You can tall whether is African or Asian species by the shape of their ears. The tusks replace deciduous milk teeth at 6–12 months of age and grow continuously at about 17 cm (7 in) a year and they never stop growing! They can lift up to 350 kg (770 lb) with their trunks.Įlephants usually have 26 teeth: the incisors, known as the tusks, 12 deciduous premolars, and 12 molars. Elephants use their trunk like we use our hands: to grab, hold, pick up, reach, touch, pull, push, and throw. It contains up to 150,000 separate muscle fascicles, with no bone and little fat. They have long lifespans, reaching 60–70 years of age.Īn elephant is characterized by thick skin, tusks made of ivory, large pillar-like legs, large flapping ears, and a proboscis, or flexible trunk, that is a fusion of the nose and upper lip.Īn elephant’s most obvious part is the trunk. Elephants are scattered throughout sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia and are found in different habitats, including savannas, forests, deserts, and marshes.
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