Did you know?

Most elephants live in the grasslands of Africa and in the forests of Asia. Elephants live in groups called herds. The herd is typically composed of up to ten females and their young. All of the females in the herd are directly related to the matriarch, who is typically the oldest and largest female. Males beyond the age of maturity are with the herd only during mating. A herd is a group that may have ten or more elephants. It is usually led by a female elephant. Herds have been known to travel ten miles or even farther to look for food and water. When elephants travel, they walk very quietly in single file.Young elephants are led by the older elephants with their tails. They stay close to their mothers at all times.The entire herd will protect the young ones if there's any sign of danger.

Elephants love water and are very good swimmers. When elephants get hot, they swim in lakes or rivers, or give themselves showers using their long trunks. An elephant can also cool off by rolling in a shady bed of mud.

Young elephants stay with their families for many years. It's not unusual for a herd of elephants to live together all of their lives. Elephants are also capable of making low frequency sounds that are below the human range of hearing; this allows wandering individuals within the herd as well as several different herds to stay in direct contact over distances of many miles.


Some facts
A newborn elephant weighs between 75-115kilos and is only 100cm tall at the shoulder. 
A grown-up elephant can weigh from 3000-5000 kilos and end up to 2.5mtrs tall at the shoulder - which may explain why an elephant cannot jump. 
However an elephant can run in short bursts of up to 20 miles per hour. 
For such a big beast it surprisingly only sleeps 4 hrs per night. 
Elephants have a huge heart weighing from 12-21 kilos, beating only at 35 beats per minute 
 

Amazing Appetites 
Elephants have gargantuan appetites and two-thirds of their day is spent eating. 
Every day an elephant eats about 250kg of vegetation and drinks up to 83 litres of water.
Elephants collect food with their trunks. 
Elephants eat grass and bark. 
During the wet season Elephants eat things low to the ground. 
During the dry season Elephants use their trunk to gather food from trees and bushes. 
Elephants suck up water into their trunks and shoot it into their mouths. 
Elephants need lots of room to roam and eat. 

Elephants stomp when they walk.
Elephants sleep standing up. 
Sometimes baby elephants lie down to sleep. 
Elephants bathe. Sometimes the spray dirt on themselves to get the parasites off. Sometimes they bathe in mud 
Elephants live in herds. 

Elephants cool off by fanning their ears. This cools the blood in their ears. That blood goes to the rest of their body and cools off the elephant. 
Elephants poop 80 pounds in one day. 
Elephants weigh 10,000 pounds. It would take 250 students to add up to 10,000 pounds. 


Only grown up ladies and their babies live in the herds. 
The daddy elephants leave the herd when they are 12 years old. 
Elephants fight with their tusks. 


(Some of us think that this must mean they are not happy in the zoo or in the circus.) 
Elephants can run 24mph for short distances. 

In one year an Elephant….
Drinks 15,500 gallons water and can eat 
1,600 ears of corn 
2,000 sweet potatoes 
3,000 cabbages, apples, carrots 
100,000 pounds of palm fronds 
1500 pounds of banana leaves 
2,000 pounds of elephant grass

An elephant has long eyelashes and lots of folds in their eyelids, which hamper their vision. They don't turn their head much so their view of the world is quite narrow. 

Elephants cannot see in colour nor can they focus properly, which makes our painting elephants even more remarkable. 

They do however see silhouettes and faded green blue hues. 

Their eyesight isn't a handicap though as 60% of their brain is dedicated to sense of smell.

Why do elephants have trunks? asks J. Navarrete, a student in Woodside, NY. 
Imagine life with a trunk: Sniff a friend's sandwich, then grab it with your nose. Reach for something on a high shelf without standing on a chair. Swim across a pool underwater, using your long nose as a snorkel. 

There are no bones in an elephant's trunk, making it as supple as a garden hose. A trunk has more than 40,000 muscles and tendons, and its tip is covered with nerve endings. In addition, there are one or two "fingers" on the tip to grasp small objects. Like a monkey's tail, a trunk is "prehensile," and can be wrapped like a rope around an object such as a branch. Unlike a monkey's trail, an elephant's trunk can weigh 400 lb. and measure 7 feet long. 

All of this makes a trunk flexible (it can hoist a log), strong (the log can weigh more than 300 lb.) and precise (it can pick up a penny lying flat on the floor). 

An elephant's trunk is the Swiss army knife of animal appendages. A trunk-equipped elephant can: Collect gallons of water, and then give itself a quick shower. Snatch the highest, tastiest leaves off a tree. Use its trunk like a periscope to sniff the air for danger. Sprinkle dust on itself to protect from biting flies. Pick up a peanut. Give another elephant's trunk an affectionate squeeze. Change its nostril size to change the sound of its voice. 

An elephant can also wade into a lake, submerge, and use the tip of its trunk as a snorkel as it swims to the other side, breathing easily all the way. Human beings, on the other hand, can only use snorkel tubes that are about a foot long. Snorkel deeper, and the mismatch between air pressure inside lungs and the increasing pressure just outside can make blood vessels swell and rupture. 

Elephant lungs are different, according to John West, a University of California scientist who studies lungs. Instead of having a pleural space between lungs and chest wall as we do, elephants have dense sheets of fibery tissue. This tissue allows elephant lungs to withstand pressures that would cause human lungs to collapse. A sign, according to scientists, that elephant ancestors were aquatic creatures. 

More evidence: Elephant fetuses start out with funnel-shaped kidney ducts, like freshwater fish and frogs. While the aquatic-style ducts disappear as the unborn elephant grows, their presence early on is a marker of a watery past. 

The elephant's trunk, many scientists think, may have first evolved as a snorkel. But trunks were also useful for gathering sea grasses to eat. The closet living relatives of the elephant may be sea cows, like manatees. 

The land-dwelling ancestors of today's elephants emerged from their aquatic origins about 30 million years ago. Animals born with long trunks had an advantage, since trunks were so useful for gathering food out of reach of many other animals. Eventually, modern elephants with long, strong trunks evolved and flourished.

The elephant's trunk is controlled by an astonishing 50,000 muscles - the most gargantuan and versatile limb in nature. 
Originally a deep-sea beast they used their nasal appendages as snorkels! 
Elephant's trunks are the most powerful known natural siphon with bristles attached to every single nerve. 
Elephants use their trunks to hold hands with their friends and are highly tactile and social animals. 
Elephant's trunks are more versatile than the human hand! 
The trunk of the elephant's never stays still and can extend, twist and turn in any direction. 
It takes 2 years for an elephant's trunk to become proficient in use. 
When the trunk is held high an elephant is alert and interested. 
Elephant's tusks are actually their incisors or cutting teeth and each tooth is about the size of a football weighing in at about 4.5kg each!

Trunk
The elephant's nose and upper lip are elongated into a muscular, powerful trunk. This truly multi-purpose tool is powerful enough to uproot trees but dextrous enough that the two 'fingers' at its tip can pick up single seeds. Elephants can swim considerable distances and, in deeper water, will use their trunks like snorkels. 

Tusks
The tusks are elongated upper incisor teeth and are not necessarily the same size. Some adults lack tusks and some have only one. Bulls typically have thicker, heavier tusks than females. Elephants will often uproot trees and then use their tusks to chisel the bark off. 

Eyes and Ears
An elephant's eyes are small relative to the huge size of the animal. The ears are very large, flat and roughly the shape of the African continent, often with tears and holes in them. The ears are laden with blood vessels and when flapped, help bring down the huge beast's body temperature. 

Feet and Tail
The front feet are roughly circular, with five blunt toenails; the hind feet are oval, with four blunt toenails. The soles are padded, allowing amazingly silent movement for such a large amimal. The tail is thin, up to 1.5 m long, and has a whisk of long, thick hairs at the end. 

Visible Male/Female Differences
Females have one pair of mammae, low on the sides of the chest, just behind the forelegs. Both sexes have a thick flap of skin hanging between their hind legs. Males are larger, taller and twice as heavy as cows. Bulls have wider heads and in profile they have a more rounded forehead. 

Diet
Very unselective when browsing acacias they swallow more wood than leaves. In summer, grass forms the bulk of the diet, replaced in winter by woody plants. Intake is about 150kg wet weight per day while water intake is 120 litres a day for an adult bull. 

Reproduction
Single calves weighing 120kg are born throughout the year after a gestation of 22 months. Calves are weaned at 3-8 years, just before the birth of the next calf. 

Sounds
Elephants are very vocal, producing a wide variety of squeals, screams and high-pitched trumpeting which are audible to humans. Seventy-five percent of the vocal communication uses frequencies too low for humans to hear. 

Legs
Elephant's leg creases have their own unique identification - just like fingerprints identify humans. 
An elephant also crosses its legs - just like humans do when relaxing. 
An elephant's brain is approx 3 times the size of a human brain - their temporal lobes are large and well developed and they have remarkable memories. 
Elephants communicate via low infrasound using 30 different infrasonic sounds to 'talk' with each other - these infrasounds are much too low for the human ear to distinguish