13 Fascinating Facts About Elephant
Elephants can recognize languages and hear with their feet, in case you didn't know. Elephants are kind animals who capture our thoughts and hearts. African and Asian elephants are the two types of elephants that exist today. Savannah elephants and forest elephants, according to certain genetic analyses, are two distinct species that make up the African elephant. Every elephant is in danger. In India, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia, Asian elephants travel across forests and grasslands. The population of African elephants travels through 37 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, passing through thorny woods and dry deserts. These are enormous sentient beings. Asian elephants can grow to a height of over 11 feet and weigh up to six tonnes. Elephants in Africa can grow from eight to thirteen feet tall and weigh over six and a half tonnes.
Elephants from Asia and Africa can live for 60 to 70 years. Despite our extensive knowledge of elephants, there is still plenty to discover about these sophisticated animals. You may discover more about the amazing elephant, from their capacity for language distinction to their benevolent demeanour.
1. Elephants Never Forget
Elephants have legendary memories, and for good reason. Elephants are the land mammals with the greatest brains. Even after many years have passed, they are still able to recall far-off watering sites, other elephants, and people they have come into contact with.
Elephants pass on a wealth of knowledge through their matriarchs from one generation to the next, and this knowledge-exchange has helped the animals survive. They can also recall how to travel over long distances to find food and water supplies, as well as how to get to alternative locations should the need arise. What's more astonishing is that they change their plans to get there just when the fruit they're looking for is about to ripen.
2. They Can Recognize Different Languages
Elephants demonstrate a sophisticated comprehension of human communication. The voices of speakers from two different groups—one that preys on the elephants and another that does not—were replayed by researchers at Kenya's Amboseli National Park. The elephants were more likely to take protective measures, such as clumping together and sniffing the air, when they heard the voices of the group they were afraid of. The elephants also reacted less strongly to female and younger male voices, with mature male voices eliciting the most agitation, the researchers discovered.
Elephant communication goes beyond comprehension. One Asian elephant picked up Korean word impersonation.
Because humans were his main social contacts while he was growing up, researchers assume that he picked up the ability to mimic speech as a way of establishing social bonds.
3. They Can Hear Through Their Feet
Elephants can communicate vocally over vast distances and have a keen sense of hearing. They emit a range of noises, such as roars, howls, barks, and snorts. However, they have a specialisation in low frequency rumbles and have peculiar hearing.
A Stanford University researcher named Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell discovered that elephants' foot stomping and lower frequency vocalisations reverberate at a frequency that other elephants can hear through the ground.
Elephants are able to hear these infrasonic signals thanks to their enormous ear bones and delicate nerve endings in their feet and trunks.
Elephants' ability to sense such seismic shocks is also beneficial to their survival. An angry elephant may be warning other elephants hundreds of kilometres away when it stomps, in addition to the people nearby. Additionally, an elephant's cry may be directed at distant family members when it rumbles.
4. Elephants Can Swim Very Well
The fact that elephants enjoy having fun in the water may not come as a surprise. They are well known for spraying themselves and other people with water from their trunks. However, it may come as a shock to learn that these enormous beasts are actually quite adept at swimming.
Elephants have sufficient buoyancy to float at the surface and paddle with their muscular legs. In order to breathe normally even when submerged, they also use their trunk as a snorkel when navigating deep water. Elephants must be able to swim in order to cross rivers and lakes when in search of food.
5. Two elephants cuddling on the ground while supporting those in need
Elephants are extremely intelligent and gregarious animals that exhibit traits like compassion, empathy, and generosity that are familiar to people. Researchers who studied elephant behaviour discovered that when one felt upset, other elephants in the area would respond with cries and touches meant to comfort the person. This behaviour was previously only observed in apes, canids, and corvids in addition to humans. Elephants also exhibit empathy and "targeted helping," in which they work together to care for a sick or injured person.
6. They Might Experience PTSD
Elephants are known to have sensitive souls, deep familial ties, a need for comfort, and a lengthy memory. The fact that elephants who experience tragedy, such as seeing a family member killed by poachers, exhibit symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder should not come as a surprise. Even decades later, poached calves will exhibit symptoms of PTSD. Long after they have found refuge in a sanctuary, elephants who have been liberated from terrible conditions still display PTSD symptoms.
7. Elephants need their senior citizens.
Elephants' elders transmit all the knowledge required for their survival. Young elephants must interact with elder family members, especially the matriarchs, in order to learn everything they will need to know as adults. The herd's matriarch carries the wisdom of the ancestors and imparts vital knowledge to the young, such as how to react to various situations and where to locate food and water.
Asian elephants are less hierarchical than their African relatives and exhibit less dominance based on age or gender, contrary to the matriarchal society that African elephants live in.
This disparity in social structure might be explained by habitat.In Africa, where situations are more difficult, the wisdom of the elderly is more priceless; in areas of Asia, where predators are few and resources are abundant, strong leadership is not as necessary.
8. They Need Their Trunks to Survive
An elephant's trunk has around 40,000 muscles, making it both strong and incredibly sensitive. Elephants smell, eat, breathe underwater, produce sounds, clean themselves, and defend themselves using their prehensile trunks. Elephants can pick up microscopic objects thanks to the "fingers" at the tips of their trunks; African elephants have two, but Asian elephants only have one. Elephants are extremely dexterous, and they can pile up little objects like grains by forming a joint with their trunk.
To choose which items to consume, an elephant will extend its trunk and use its sense of smell. Asian elephants were able to tell, just by smelling, which of two sealed buckets held more food in a 2019 study. A different study discovered that African elephants could distinguish between different vegetation and select their favourite using simply fragrance.
Elephants also hug, caress, and soothe one another with their trunks, and young elephants suck their trunks in the same way that infants do with their thumbs. Evidently, this teaches them how to make better use of their trunks. A newborn elephant learns "how to regulate and manipulate the muscles in the trunk so that it can carry out its tasks" thanks to the over 50,000 muscles in its trunk.
9. They Have a Relationship with Rock Hyraxes
Surprisingly, the rock hyrax, a small, fuzzy herbivore native to Africa and the Middle East that resembles a mouse, is the elephant's closest living relative based only on size. Manatees and dugongs are additional creatures that are closely related to elephants (a marine mammal that looks like a manatee).
Despite its looks, the hyrax nevertheless resembles elephants in certain ways. These include flattened nails on the tips of their digits, tusks that originate from their incisor teeth (as opposed to most mammals, who produce tusks from their canine teeth), and several commonalities among their reproductive systems. Tethytheria, which went extinct more than 50 million years ago, is the ancestor of the manatee, rock hyrax, and elephant. The animals have had ample time to follow extremely distinct evolutionary pathways. They still share a tight relationship despite differences in appearance and behaviour.
10. Elephants Pay Respect to the Dead
Elephants are known to be highly sensitive, but their sentient nature is most evident in the interest they show for the deceased. Elephants even show curiosity in other unrelated species, inspecting, touching, and sniffing the dead animal. Researchers have seen elephants returning frequently, making an effort to save dead animals, and emitting distress calls. 13
Elephants will return and touch the bones of an animal long after it has passed away with their feet and trunks.
14 A young 10-year-old elephant who visited her mother's cadaver in Kenya was reported by The Washington Post as leaving the scene with "the temporal glands on each side of her head... gushing liquid: a behaviour related to stress, fear, and violence." Maybe a form of tears?
11. They Cover Their Skin With Dirt
Elephants prefer to play in the mud for a good reason. Despite having a tough-looking hide, elephants have delicate skin that is susceptible to sunburn. Elephants cover themselves in sand to protect themselves from the sun's harmful rays. Elephant adults will also cover little ones with dust. Elephants frequently put mud or clay over themselves as a layer of protection after taking a bath in a river.
12. They Possess Math Skills
When it comes to math, Asian elephants may be among the most intelligent members of the animal kingdom. Asian elephants were being taught to operate a touch screen computer by researchers in Japan. One of the three elephants was able to select the panel with more fruit when given a choice between different quantities.
Only Asian elephants have been demonstrated to have this skill, it should be mentioned. Different cognitive capacities may have emerged from the split of the African and Asian elephant species 7.6 million years ago, according to researchers. According to some research, the average EQ for Asian and African elephants is 2.14 and 1.67, respectively.
13. Elephants are under danger.
Every elephant is in danger. African elephants are at risk, while Asian elephants are in peril. 1718 Elephants are mostly at risk from habitat loss, fragmentation, and degradation. Elephants are also threatened by people. Conflicts between the animals and people have resulted in the retaliatory slaughter of elephants when farmers encroach on the habitats of elephants to produce crops. Asian elephants in particular cannot cohabit with the growing human population because they live in one of the world's most populous regions.