Fun Facts About Elephants
In this article, we'll examine some amazing elephant facts and point out some of their distinctive characteristics.
Why Are Elephants Unique?
1. Elephants Rarely 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 Help Those Who Are 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 behavior discovered that when one felt upset, other
elephants in the area would respond with cries and touches meant to comfort the
person. This behavior 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.
3. 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.
4. 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 about other unrelated
species, inspecting, touching, and sniffing dead animals. Researchers have
seen elephants returning frequently, making an effort to save dead animals, and
emitting distress calls.
Elephants will
return and touch the bones of an animal long after it has passed away with
their feet and trunks. 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 behavior
related to stress, fear, and violence." Maybe a form of tears?
5. They Might Experience PTSD
Elephants are
known to have sensitive souls, deep familial ties, a need for comfort, and a
long memory. The fact that elephants that suffer tragedy, such as seeing a family
member slaughtered 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.
These traumatic
events also have a deleterious effect on learning. Young elephants lose
important social knowledge that would have been passed down by adults when
selective individuals are killed during a cull or by poachers.
6. They Can Hear From 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 specialization in low-frequency rumbles and have a peculiar hearing.
A Stanford
University researcher named Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell discovered that
elephants' foot stomping and lower-frequency vocalizations reverberate at a
frequency that other elephants can hear through the ground. Elephants are able
to hear these infrasonic signals thanks to their enormous earbones 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 kilometers 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.
7. 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.
8. They Cover Their Skin With Mud
9. 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 the Korean word
impersonation. Theoretically, he learned to mimic words as a way of forging
social bonds because his only social contact as a child was with people.
10. 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 in that African
elephants live. 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.
11. 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 favorite using simple fragrances.
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. They reportedly
learn to use their trunks more efficiently as a result of this. A juvenile
elephant learns "how to regulate and manipulate the muscles in the trunk
so that it may fine-tune its use" thanks to the over 50,000 muscles in the
trunk.
12. 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 (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 behavior.
13. Elephants Eat a Lot of Food
In the wild, an elephant can consume 100 to
1000 pounds of food in a period of 16 hours. An elephant's intestines could
measure 19 meters or more than 60 feet.
14. Elephants Are The Largest Land Creature
The largest land creature still alive is the
African elephant. Elephants can survive in almost any area as long as there is
enough food and water available. Depending on the species, their habitat should
be abundant with grass.
