Elephants Giant Mammals

Elephants Giant Mammals

Big and Brainy Without a doubt, elephants are the most gigantic land animals living on Earth today. To find a more immense walking creature, you would have to go back to the age of dinosaurs! Elephants aren't just huge. They're also highly intelligent, have many ways to communicate with one another, and are clever enough to work together to get things done.

Exploring the Elephant No other animal quite compares to the stately elephant, with its giant body, thick gray or brown skin, and round, sturdy legs. Most unusual of all is its long, snakelike trunk- an appendage that is the elephant's all-in-one nose and upper lip. Elephants use their super-sized trunks for several significant purposes. They breathe through them, use them to pick up food and water, and blast air through them to make a deafening trumpeting sound. Elephants also touch other elephants with their trunks in different ways to communicate. Two elephants will often twist their trunks together to show affection. A mother elephant might use her trunk to gently stroke her calf and calm it down-or to punish it with an elephant- sized smack!

African and Asian Elephants The two main species of elephants are African and Asian. It is simple to tell them apart if you know what continent you are in, but there are other clues as well. African elephants are greater in size than their Asian relatives, with males measuring 13 feet (4 m) tall and weighing up to 14, 000 pounds (6, 350 kg). Females are shorter and lighter, at around 9 feet (2. 7 m) tall and up to 10, 000 pounds (4, 540 kg). Male Asian elephants are around 3 feet (0. 9144 m) shorter and about 3, 000 pounds (1, 360 kg) lighter than African males. Females are even smaller and, unlike African females, often have no tusks at all. An African elephant's appearance differs from its Asian counterpart in other ways, too. Its floppy ears are often twice as large as those of an Asian elephant. The back of an African elephant also dips down in the middle, unlike an Asian elephant's. If you inspected the animal even more thoroughly, you would see two “ fingers" at the end of its jumbo trunk. These handy flaps grab food and small objects.

In addition to having smaller ears, Asian elephants have large, round bumps on the tops of their huge heads. Spotting these bumps is a clear way to identify the species. The bumps are often the tallest point on an Asian elephant. Their backs are flat or arched, and we can't forget their trunks, which have just one “ finger" at the end instead of two.

Elephant Hangouts Elephants are adaptable enough to live in many different types of habitats, as long as they can find enough food and water. In Africa, elephants live in hot, dry grasslands, rainforests, and even deserts. They can live at sea level or high in the mountains. Asian elephants live in wet rainforests and swamps as well as in other more arid forests with long dry seasons. Because of elephants' hulking size, even ferocious lions and tigers won't attack a healthy adult elephant. Humans, however, hunt them for their ivory tusks and shoot them for destroying crops. As human population increases, elephants' natural habitats are disappearing. Humans build more roads, plant more crops, and cut down more trees. Less and less land is available for wild animals-especially ones that need large amounts of food and space. Elephants once roamed almost all of Africa and South Asia, but today their habitats are shrinking significantly in size.