One of the best known animals, elephants are amazing animals. The following are the most important facts about these animals that you should know:
• Elephants are the largest land animals in the world.
• Elephants generally do not have predators (animals that eat them) due to their massive size. Newborn elephants are however vulnerable to attacks from lions, tigers, and hyenas. The biggest danger to elephants are humans; elephants have been hunted for their tusks to near extinction in some cases.
• The largest elephant ever recorded was an African elephant. It was 24,000 lbs. (10,886 kg) and 13 feet (3.96 m) tall from its feet to its shoulders.
• Elephants can live to be over 70 years old.
• Elephants are known to routinely display learning abilities, playfulness, self-awareness and cooperation. They can also use several tools. They have compassion, humor and grief as well.
• Only one mammal can’t jump — the elephant.
• The average weight for an elephant heart is about 27 to 46 pounds!
• Elephants eat grasses, roots, fruit and bark. They use their tusks to pull the bark from trees and dig roots out of the ground. An elephant has an appetite that matches its size. An adult can eat 300 lbs (136 kg) of food in a day, according to the National Geographic.
• Elephants cry, play, have incredible memories, and laugh.
• Elephants have a highly developed brain and the largest of all the land mammals. The brain is 3 or 4 times larger than that of humans although smaller as a proportion of body weight.
• Elephants have a slow pulse rate of 27. For a canary it is 1000!
• Suas orelhas maciças não são apenas para mantê-los legal ou apenas uma parte proporcionalmente grande do corpo. Eles são abençoados com excelentes habilidades auditivas para. Eles são capazes de ouvir as trombetas de outros elefantes, mesmo a uma distância de 8 quilômetros ou 5 milhas.
• African elephants live in sub-Saharan Africa, the rain forests of Central and West Africa and the Sahel desert in Mali. Asian elephants live in Nepal, India and Southeast Asia in scrub forests and rain forests.
• An elephant’s skin is an inch thick.
• Elephants have poor eyesight but an amazing sense of smell.
• At the age of 16, an elephant can reproduce, but rarely has more than four children throughout her lifetime. At birth, an elephant calf weighs about 230 lbs!
• A baby elephant is called a calf. As the calf grows, it will gain 2 to 3 lbs. every day until its first birthday. By the time they are 2 or 3 years old, calves are ready to be weaned. Male calves will wander off on their own, while females will stay with their mothers. When they are 13 to 20 years old, they will be mature enough to have their own young. Elephants live 30 to 50 years in the wild.
• Elephants have the longest pregnancy of all the animals. It takes a female 22 months from conception to give birth.
• Elephants purr like cats do, as a means of communication.
• Elephants prefer one tusk over the other, just as people are either left or right-handed.
• Tusks are an elephant’s incisor teeth. They are used for defense, digging for water, and lifting things.
• Elephants have four molars, one on the top and one on the bottom on both sides of the mouth. One molar can weigh about five pounds and is the size of a brick!
• The elephant trunk has more than 40,000 muscles in it.
• According to the Red List of Threatened Species of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Asian elephant is endangered. Though it is not known exactly how many Asian elephants remain, it is believed that the population is decreasing. The African elephant is considered vulnerable. Overall, its populations are increasing. According to the African Wildlife Foundation, there are around 470,000 African elephants roaming the globe.
• Elephants waive their trunks up in the air and from side to side to smell better.
• The elephant’s trunk is able to sense the size, shape and temperature of an object. An elephant uses its trunk to lift food and suck up water then pour it into its mouth.
• Elephants can swim – they use their trunk to breathe like a snorkel in deep water.f7c64cbee9daf70e26488fb4b5aadf2f9971bcb2.jpg
• Elephant feet are covered in a soft padding that help uphold their weight, prevent them from slipping, and dull any sound. Therefore elephants can walk almost silently!
• Elephants use their feet to listen, they can pick up sub-sonic rumblings made by other elephants, through vibrations in the ground. Elephants are observed listening by putting trunks on the ground and carefully positioning their feet.
• Elephants are highly sensitive and caring animals. if a baby elephant complains, the entire family will rumble and go over to touch and caress it. Elephants express grief, compassion, self-awareness, altruism and play.
• Elephants have greeting ceremonies when a friend that has been away for some time returns to the group.
• Elephants have large, thin ears. Their ears are made up of a complex network of blood vessels which regulate an elephant’s temperature. Blood is circulated through their ears to cool them down in hot climates.
• An elephant is capable of hearing sound waves well below our human hearing limitation. The far reaching use of high pressure infrasound opens the elephant’s spatial experience far beyond our limited capabilities.
• Elephants are social creatures. They sometimes “hug” by wrapping their trunks together in displays of greeting and affection.
• Elephants are really scared of bees! Yeah, we are speaking about those tiny flying insects that are known for making honey and delivering really painful stings. Oh yes! They are also afraid of ants.
• Elephants pay homage to the bones of their dead, gently touching the skulls and tusks with their trunks and feet. when an elephant walks past a place that a loved one has died, he/she will stop dead still; a silent and empty pause that can last several minutes.