Elephants: Giants of the World

Class: Mammalia (mammal)
Order: Proboscidea (mammals with trunks)
Family: Elephantidae

The elephant is a big, bulky beast: the largest land mammal on earth. There are 2 species of elephant, the African and the Asian elephant.

African elephants live mostly in the savanna grasslands and are slightly bigger than African forest elephants. The Asian elephant, which is smaller than both, lives mainly in the forest.

Jumbo jets and trunk calls
The elephant has a massive grey-black body, large head, long tusks, short neck and stout pillar-like legs. The feet are short and broad with hooves or nails and an elastic pad on the sole. The elephant has a good sense of smell.

The muscular trunk, which is a fusion of the nose and upper lip, is truly remarkable. It can move in all directions with precision, pick up small and large objects, and rip branches from trees. Elephants also use their trunk to carry food and water to their mouth, or spray a jet of water or dust over the body.

The trunk has other uses as well - it is used to make some of the sounds that help elephants keep in touch with one another. Elephants sometimes greet each other by putting the tip of the trunk into the other's mouth, and a baby elephant sucks its trunk just like a child sucks its thumb!

An elephant's tusks are actually its incisor teeth on either side of the upper jaw. The tusks are made of ivory. Cows have smaller and more slender tusks than bulls.

Elephants' cheek teeth (molars) are very strong and can chew the branches and roots of trees. Their teeth thus wear out very fast. But as a huge grinding molar wears away, another tooth appears behind it and moves into place. Each molar tooth is replaced 4 times in an elephant's lifetime. When the last of its teeth have gone, an old elephant can no longer chew food and may face starvation and death.


Wasteful feeders
The elephant has an appetite to match its size. It eats as much as 5% of its body weight every day and drinks about 160 litres of water. Elephants are rough feeders, destroying much more vegetation than they eat and eating more than they can digest!

Elephants eat a wide variety of plant food, ranging from grasses to tree bark and leaves. They tear down branches and uproot trees with their trunks and strip the bark off trees with their tusks.

Although destructive, this behaviour makes survival easier for other animals. The fallen trees and broken branches they leave behind provide extra food for small browsing animals. During long spells of dry hot weather when water dries up, elephants use their tusks and trunk to dig wells in dry river beds.

Keeping cool
Like many other large mammals in hot climates, the elephant has to find ways of keeping cool. This is why you often see them in water, plastering themselves with cool mud. The African elephant fans its large ears backward and forward to control its body temperature.

Baby elephants
Female African elephants are ready to have babies by the time they are 13 or 14 years old. Elephants can have babies every 4 years, but where living conditions are poor and food is scarce, they give birth less often.

Elephants have the longest gestation period (pregnancy) of all mammals, about 660 days or almost 2 years! At birth, the baby elephant weighs about 120kg. The mother elephant nurses the calf for several years. Elephants grow quite fast until they are about 15 years old. After this, the growth of the body slows down.

Solitary Bulls and Social Cows
An adult male (bull) elephant lives alone or sometimes in small groups. The bulls join the females (cows) only for mating. Cows live in herds with their calves. Bulls leave the herd when they become ‘teenagers’, but females stay close to their mother for the rest of their lives. The herd is usually led by an old, wise cow elephant. She knows all the paths in the bush and teaches the young ones the best feeding and bathing places.



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