What Do Elephants Eat Elephants Family and Offspring

Overview

"Where I alive"

There are two subspecies of African elephant: the savanna elephant (Loxodonta africana) and the woods elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis). The savanna elephant is found in eastern and southern Africa, living in varied habitat including marsh, savanna, woodlands, and semi-desert.

All 4 elephants at the Maryland Zoo are African elephants of the savanna type. In March 2007, the Zoo historic the outset elephant nascence in its 132-year history. "Samson," a male dogie, was born to "Felix," one of two adult females in the Zoo's herd. "Anna" is the other developed female, and "Tuffy" is the adult bull. You can meet the elephants on exhibit in the Zoo'due south African Journey area.

"How I Live In that location"

Elephants are family unit-oriented animals with complex social lives. Related females alive together for life in herds and enhance offspring together. All members of a herd defer to one leader, the oldest and wisest female in the family group, known every bit the matriarch. She leads the others to h2o and food, decides when to slumber and when to motion, responds offset to threats, and basically takes charge in every conceivable situation.

Equally male person elephants reach boyhood, they strike out on a different path from their female relatives. They leave their birth herds. Young males often seek out other males their age and form close bonds. Younger males besides may acquaintance with older males in loose groups known as bachelor herds. While the social lives of both male person and female elephants remain mysterious in many ways, and while in that location are still many questions to be answered, it appears that male elephants larn and practice how to "be male" while in the company of other males in bachelor herds.

Developed male person elephants also are inclined instinctively to spend much of their time lone. This is peculiarly true when a male person elephant enters musth, a menstruation of heightened aggression that paves the way for asserting dominance and competing successfully for females. All male elephants are in constant search of mates, but only those that assert their dominance over other males volition win the right to breed.

Elephants crave a tremendous corporeality of nutrient to maintain their massive bodies. In a unmarried day, one elephant may eat 300 pounds of vegetation, including grasses, roots, bark, leaves, and fruit, and drink xxx to fifty gallons of water. In lodge to find this much food and water, wild elephants are almost always on the motility.

Elephants can communicate with each other over long distances through sound, including low-frequency infrasound that nosotros can't hear. Standing up close to an elephant making an infrasonic call, yous might hear or feel a low rumble. Another elephant would be able to hear that infrasonic phone call upwardly to 12 miles away! Elephants likewise communicate through touch on, sight, smell, and chemical processing. Body linguistic communication is highly developed in elephants. Their sense of smell is as infrequent every bit their sense of hearing, and they also exhibit long-term memory. They are extremely social animals that protect their weakest, help their injured, and seem to mourn their dead.

"Making My Mark"

Elephants affect their environment perhaps more than any other creature on earth. Their size, strength, and food needs make this inevitable. They can completely change a landscape merely past feeding. They strip bark and leaves from trees and bushes, pull copse straight out of the ground, bruise underbrush, dig for roots, dig holes in dry riverbeds to attain water, and spread plant seeds over many miles with dung deposits. At that place can be no mistaking when an elephant herd has passed through an area. Considering of their tremendous environmental touch, elephants too greatly influence the survival and adaptive strategies of many other institute and animal species sharing the aforementioned ecosystem.

"What Eats Me"

Given their tremendous size and force, and because they gather in groups, elephants accept few predators to worry about. Lions, hyenas, and crocodiles may attempt to prey on young or sick elephants. However, elephants are often successful at fending off predators, protecting their young, and defending ill or injured herd mates. For case, when a matriarch detects a nearby predator, she will herd offspring together and all other developed females in the group volition form an outward facing circumvolve around them, providing many layers of protection from the would-be assailant. Elephants are nigh vulnerable to, and threatened by, humans. Demand for elephant tusks – the main source of commercial ivory – has led to aggressive poaching that has decimated elephant populations across Africa. Elephants may also autumn victim to farmers defending their crops or local residents fearful of interactions with elephants. Although it is illegal to kill wild African elephants, information technology has proven extremely difficult to eradicate poaching and other elephant killings.

Raising Young

Female person elephants reach sexual maturity at about historic period x but may non mate for several more years. When females come into heat, they attract convenance bulls. Bulls of the highest rank will proceeds access to females and breed. After an exceptionally long pregnancy of virtually 22 months, a female volition give nativity to usually i calf, and very rarely to twins. She will nurse her offspring for well-nigh 4 years, commonly until she gives birth again, only she will intendance for each offspring for many years more. Babe and juvenile elephants in a herd take the benefit of multiple caregivers, as all female relatives share in raising the young. In particular, young females take on the role of allomother, which is comparable to bodyguard. They go along sentry over the youngest elephants, help them, comfort them, play with them, and proceeds mothering experience all the while. Research has shown that elephant family unit groups with few or no allomothers suffer college baby mortality than those with allomothers.

Conservation

African elephants are listed as vulnerable by the IUCN, the earth'due south leading conservation organization. Conservation issues affecting African elephants are complicated. Despite an international ban on ivory trade passed in 1989, poaching remains a significant threat. Competition with humans for limited space and resource is an as significant threat. African elephants once ranged freely from southward of the Sahara Desert to northern Southward Africa. Today, they are mostly confined to parks and reserves. Equally a result, their natural habitats are fragmented andthere tin terminate up existence too many elephants in besides little infinite, yet those that range exterior of protected borders are quite likely to come up into disharmonize with people or to exist killed by poachers. In guild to insure that African elephants continue to walk the earth for many generations to come up, successful long-term resolution to human-elephant contest and disharmonize must be achieved.

The Story Continues

Taxonomy

Taxonomy

• Kingdom: Animalia
• Phylum: Chordata
• Subphylum: Vertebrata
• Form: Mammalia
• Order: Proboscidea
• Family: Elephantidae
• Genera: Loxodonta
• Species: africana

The Story Continues

Peel

Skin

Elephants are known equally pachyderms along with hippos and rhinos. The name is derived from the Latin words for "thick" ("pachy") and "peel" ("derm") and ways, quite literally, "thick-skin." Yet although the skin is almost one to two inches thick in some areas, information technology is less than one millimeter thick in others. One such area is behind the ears where large amounts of blood vessels are found shut to the skin surface. Warm claret passing through these blood vessels is cooled before recirculating throughout the trunk. The skin also helps to disperse an elephant's torso heat, cooling the creature. (Elephants lack sweat glands.)

Elephants have evolved many folds in their skin layers, giving them their "baggy" and wrinkled appearance. The folds serve an of import purpose by increasing the overall area of the pare, which provides more space to allow for the dispersion of body heat. The wrinkles also are the main reason elephants will mud breast-stroke. The initial cooling of the moisture mud helps the elephant absurd downwards instantly. Moisture trapped in all of the wrinkles continues to cool the elephant even after it leaves the mud source. The mud also protects the elephant's skin from insects, sun, and moisture loss.

The Story Continues

Food

Food

Elephants are herbivores, which ways that they but eat constitute material. African elephants eat a huge diversity of institute textile including grasses, bark, twigs, roots, leaves, fruits, and vegetables. They are even capable of eating the wooden trunks of trees and logs by chipping off pieces with their tusks or by simply chewing on them with their huge grinding teeth.

Elephants maintain their big size past ingesting an enormous amount of food. Elephants have highly inefficient digestive systems; near 60% of the food they eat goes undigested. The trunk, tusks, and teeth are highly adjusted to aid them acquire and process the big amounts of nutrient they need.

The Story Continues

Body

Trunk

The trunk is a modification of the upper lip and the olfactory organ combined. At the end of the torso are 2 fingerlike projections that are used to pinch and grip both small and large food items and objects. The trunk is composed of over 100,000 individual muscles that make it a very potent appendage. Information technology is an peculiarly astonishing accommodation when y'all consider that the entire human body has less than 800 private muscles total and that then far, there is no other appendage in the entire animal world known to exist equally specialized equally an elephant's body.

An elephant uses its trunk to suck upward water and blow the water into its mouth or onto its body for bathing and cooling purposes. However, an elephant cannot drink h2o through its trunk.

In addition to food gathering, drinking, and bathing, the trunk is used for social interactions amongst herd mates. Elephants brand regular contact with 1 another using their trunks. Such social interactions may include greeting, caressing, and demonstrations of dominance or submission through subtle positioning of the trunk and different trunk postures. The trunk can too human activity as a resonating tube, producing the classic sounds of an elephant trumpet or the sounds of a subtle, reverberating communication rumble.

Perchance ane of the most interesting and yet lesser known facts about an elephant's trunk is that information technology is able to discover and distinguish smells several hundred times meliorate than any canis familiaris on the planet! Olfactory property is one of an elephant's greatest senses and it is all located in the trunk.

The Story Continues

Tusks

Tusks

An elephant'southward tusks are modified teeth. They are an elongation of the 2d incisors and continue to abound throughout the life of the elephant. Tusks are used for digging, debarking trees, moving objects, making contact with one another, intimidation in dominance displays and for general tools in elephant life. Males use their tusks when sparring with each other and establishing dominance.

Tusks are made of ivory, which is an incredibly dense form of bone. Information technology forms in a cantankerous thatch blueprint, making it very hard. There continues to be great demand for ivory tusks considering of their unique backdrop and inherent beauty. Because they will fetch a high price, poachers continue to illegally kill elephants for their tusks. This is a major factor in the decline of wild elephant populations worldwide.

The Story Continues

Teeth

Teeth

An elephant has only 4 teeth in its oral cavity. They are considered molars and are institute in each section of the jaw, ii on each side of the oral fissure. Ane tooth can be the size of a brick and has a large surface surface area of ridges specifically adapted for grinding the large volume of plant textile that elephants eat every day.

The teeth get worn down with all the grinding and chewing of fibrous establish cloth. To recoup, elephants have evolved replaceable teeth! An elephant has six sets of teeth in its lifetime. Replacement teeth come up in horizontally rather than vertically like ours. The older molar is pushed forward past the newer tooth and eventually falls out in pieces.

The Story Continues

Communication

Advice

Elephants are considered one of the near intelligent of all land animals. They have the largest brain of any mammal. The temporal lobes of the elephant's encephalon, which function in recognition, storage, and retrieval of information related to sight, touch, scent, and hearing, are peculiarly large and enormously complex. Relative to brain size, these temporal lobes appear to exist larger, more than convoluted, and denser than those of all other animals except humans. Based on scientific bear witness, elephants seem to remember individuals, places, and learned skills for years. It really is true that "an elephant never forgets."

Elephants have a highly developed system of advice through sounds. Elephants produce a broad range of sounds from very depression frequency, inaudible infrasound to soft rumbles, trumpets, snorts, roars, and fifty-fifty growls. The low frequency, or infrasound, allows elephants to communicate beyond miles. It is below the range of sound that the human ear can notice. Elephants detect the low vibrations through their ears, feet, and torso tip. Special adaptations in each of these parts of the torso pick up and transmit sounds to the hearing centers of the brain.

Elephants also possess one of the most well-developed senses of smell in the animal kingdom. This keen sense of smell is used not only to locate nutrient and h2o sources only also for communication. Elephants observe and process many chemic signals in a wide variety of smells throughout their environment. Sources of odors used in chemical advice between elephants include urine, carrion, saliva, and secretions from the temporal gland.

Elephants are family-oriented. Herds are fabricated upwardly of woman groups and their offspring. Older, more experienced females pb elephant families. They are called ascendant females or matriarchs of the herd. Each herd consists of mostly related females (mothers, aunts, grandmothers, and cousins) and their calves, including young male offspring and occasionally non-related individuals. Herd sizes range from 20 to 100 individuals. Female family unit members stay together for life.Young males entering adolescence get out their family groups to join available herds, only at times lead a lonely life due to a natural condition chosen "musth". Musth in adult bull elephants is characterized by a significant increase in reproductive hormones (specifically testosterone) that results in strong changes in behavior. Bachelor herds are important for teaching young males how to go strong, adult bulls. Adult bulls associate with female person herds for breeding purposes only.

Ane of the almost important functions of the female herd is to enhance calves. A female person usually has her commencement calf while in her teens. A male becomes reproductively mature on boilerplate at age xiii merely unremarkably won't breed with females until his late 20s when he is large and strong enough to compete with other bulls for the opportunity.

Once a female is significant, gestation lasts most 22 months. She will requite nativity to a calf that weighs 150 to 300 pounds and stands 2 to iii anxiety alpine. At birth, a calf is almost helpless and does not have full apply of its torso yet, merely will rapidly become to its feet and stand on its own. The new calf begins nursing within a few hours of standing and speedily gains the strength and coordination needed to go along pace with its mother as she moves around in search of food. Elephants have a very long adolescence, with a developmental rate similar to humans, and a long life expectancy.

The Story Continues

Social Construction

Social Structure

Elephants are family-oriented. Herds are fabricated up of adult female person groups and their offspring. Older, more than experienced females lead elephant families. They are chosen dominant females or matriarchs of the herd. Each herd consists of by and large related females (mothers, aunts, grandmothers, and cousins) and their calves, including young male offspring and occasionally non-related individuals. Herd sizes range from twenty to 100 individuals. Female family unit members stay together for life.

Immature males inbound adolescence leave their family groups to join bachelor herds, simply at times lead a solitary life due to a natural condition called "musth". Musth in adult balderdash elephants is characterized by a significant increase in reproductive hormones (specifically testosterone) that results in strong changes in behavior. Bachelor herds are important for teaching young males how to become strong, developed bulls. Developed bulls associate with female herds for breeding purposes simply.

Ane of the most important functions of the female person herd is to heighten calves. A female usually has her first calf while in her teens. A male person becomes reproductively mature on average at age thirteen but usually won't brood with females until his late 20s when he is large and strong enough to compete with other bulls for the opportunity.

Once a female is pregnant, gestation lasts about 22 months. She will give nativity to a calf that weighs 150 to 300 pounds and stands two to three feet tall. At birth, a calf is almost helpless and does not have total employ of its body nonetheless, but will speedily get to its feet and stand up on its own. The new calf begins nursing inside a few hours of standing and quickly gains the strength and coordination needed to keep stride with its mother as she moves around in search of food. Elephants have a very long adolescence, with a developmental rate like to humans, and a long life expectancy.

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Source: https://www.marylandzoo.org/animal/african-elephant/

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