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Basic Elephant

Elephant Lifecycle

In the ranking of earth's most unusual and interesting creatures, elephants would have to be placed high on the list. It's not difficult to imagine an elephant as an alien from another planet with its long nose and large flapping ears. Despite their curious looks, they share a similar lifecycle to mankind. Female elephants (cows) rarely have more than one calf at a time. This is after a rather long gestation period of two years. Puberty is reached around thirteen or fourteen years of age and those calf-bearing years last until approximately age fifty. Elephants have a life expectancy of about sixty years, but have been observed to live more than seventy.

Elephant Society

Elephants live in a matriarchal society with herds composed of all females and their calves. When the male calves are old enough, they will split from the herd and make do for themselves. The females, on the other hand, stay with the herd for their entire lives.

Elephant Trunk

An elephant's trunk is definitely its treasure. The trunk is a union of the upper lip and nose filled with hundreds of thousands of muscles. A highly sensitive yet powerful organ, an elephant using its trunk can pick up a dime and just as easily pull down a tree.

Contrary to popular belief, elephants do not actually drink through their trunks. They fill them with water and then pour that into their mouths. But watch out, they can and will spray that water onto themselves and anyone else in spraying range.

Elephant Senses

An elephant's vision can at best be described as mediocre. Offsetting this poor eyesight is an amazing sense of smell and hearing. Elephants are said to communicate through low frequency rumblings that only they can hear over miles of terrain. The large ears functioning like satellite dishes enables the elephant to focus on sounds that we couldn't possibly discern. The ears also serve another purpose. They are very thin and filled with many blood vessels. The flapping motion of the ears lets them work like a radiator cooling the blood flowing through them.

Elephant Species

Today there are three major species of elephants, Asian, African savanna and African forest. Asian and forest elephants are generally smaller than the savanna. The Asians are lighter in color than the savannas and the forest elephants are generally darker still. The savannas possess the largest tusks of all the species and their ears are larger than the other two. Two other distinguishing character are the trunk and the toes. The Asian elephant has one small 'finger' on the end of its trunk, while the savanna and the forest elephant has two. The Asian and the forest elephant has five toes on its front feet and four toes on the back. The savanna has four and three respectively.

The Elephant "problem"

The elephant is a grazing herbivore. To maintain its massive size and weight an elephant must consume large quantities of plant food daily. As the human population expands, mankind encroaches on the habitat of all animals. Farmers need more cleared fertile land to grow crops and cities need more land to expand. A herd of elephants does not mix well with farming or city dwelling. The elephant population is rapidly dwindling. Will we watch the elephant numbers decrease to zero? Will we limit our growth to enhance the survival of other species? These questions address the two extremes of the problem, but the answer must lie closer to the middle.

We at allElephants do not proclaim to have a solution. We just feel that the earth would lose one its greatest treasures, if we lost the elephants.