60 Interesting Facts About Elephant You Need to Know

Facts About Elephant - Friends, many types of animals are found in the world, but the heaviest animal is the elephant. In the forest, elephants are found only in herds. Elephant's body is huge. The elephant has a long trunk with which it picks up food and puts it in the mouth. Friends, there are many interesting facts about elephants too. In this post, we have given interesting information about many elephants. Hope you like this post.

60 Interesting Facts About Elephant You Need to Know

Female elephants spend their whole lives living in tight family groups with their female relatives. The eldest female normally leads the group.
Male elephants leave the herd between the ages of 12 and 15 and usually live alone (although may sometimes form small groups with other males).
Elephants are extremely intelligent animals and have excellent memories. Matriarchs rely on this memory during dry seasons when they need to guide their herds, sometimes for tens of miles, to watering holes that they remember from the past.
There’s an easy way to tell the African elephants apart from their Asian cousins – their ears! African elephants have large ears shaped like the continent of Africa! Asian elephants’ ears are smaller and shaped like India's. Cool, huh?
You can tell a lot about an elephant by looking at its tusks! Elephant tusks never stop growing, so enormous tusks can be a sign of an old elephant. Both male and female African elephants grow tusks, but only male Asian elephants grow them. A tusk-less adult elephant is likely to be a female Asian elephant.
Until recently, African Forest elephants were thought to be a subspecies of the African elephant, but new research discovered that they are actually a separate species entirely. These elephants live in the tropical forests of Africa’s Congo Basin. They have straighter tusks and more rounded ears than Savannah elephants.
Elephants are highly social animals with incredible memories. It’s really true that elephants never forget. Elephants are known to display complex behavior indicating that they feel empathy for others and are capable of demonstrating other emotions including grief.
Elephants can get sunburned! These giants bathe in mud to help protect their skin from the sun. They also do that to keep bugs off.
Elephant tusks have a variety of uses: as a tool to dig for food or water and to strip bark from trees; as a weapon in battles with rivals; and as a courtship aid – the larger his tusks, the more attractive a male elephant may appear to a female.
Female elephants live in groups, all related and led by a matriarch, usually the oldest in the group. She’ll decide where and when they move and rest, day to day and season to season. Males leave the family unit between the ages of 12-15 and may lead solitary lives or live temporarily with other males.
Female elephants remain pregnant for 2 years – the longest gestation period of all mammals. Having a baby elephant is no small commitment either. You may ask how much does an elephant weighs at birth, and the answer is a staggering 120kg!
Elephants have small eyes and poor eyesight, but they make up for this with their amazing sense of smell – the best in the whole animal kingdom! An elephant can smell water from up to 12 miles away.
Elephants communicate with one another using sound, touch, and scent. Their hearing is excellent (they can hear a trumpeting call from up to 5 miles away), and they use a wide range of sounds to talk to each other – including those that humans are not able to hear.
Elephants are highly sensitive and caring animals and have been observed to express grief, compassion, altruism, and play. They perform greeting ceremonies when a friend that has been away for some time returns to the group, and they sometimes ‘hug’ by wrapping their trunks together. Elephants will pay respect to the bones of their dead by gently touching the skulls and tusks with their trunks and feet.
Adult elephants spend about 16 hours a day eating – they require up to 300kg of food and 160 liters of water each day.
Elephants have 6 sets of molar teeth, upon which they depend for survival. When the last set is lost, the animal is unable to eat and eventually dies of starvation.
An elephant’s trunk is a very impressive multi-tool. Besides being a long nose used for smelling, breathing, and trumpeting, it is also used as a hand to grab things – it is sensitive enough to pick up a blade of grass and strong enough to rip the branches off a tree. The trunk is also used as a huge straw – elephants can suck up to 14 liters of water a time into their trunks and then blow this water into their mouths to drink. When bathing, they also use their trunk to spray themselves with water and mud. A great pub quiz question is how many muscles are in an elephant’s trunk? Amazingly the answer is 40,000!
Sadly, elephants are in trouble. Many are killed by humans for their ivory tusks because they’ve come into conflict with communities or simply for sport. Asian elephants also face threats from tourist attractions where people pay to ride on their backs or paint pictures on them.
There are three different species of elephant – the African Savannah Elephant, the African Forest elephant, and the Asian elephant. Elephants are known for their large ears, tusks made of ivory, and their trunks – which are actually a fusion of their nose and upper lip.
All that eating means one thing, gang, an awful lot of poo! Each elephant creates about one tonne of poo per week, which keeps the soil fertile and disperses tree seeds. Elephants also dig waterholes and create footpaths, literally changing the landscape around them!
In Mount Elgon National Park in Kenya, a group of elephants uses their tusks to mine for salt in underground caves! They feel their way around with their trunks and eat the salts by breaking them off with their tusks.
Elephants are able to recognize themselves using mirrors. Such displays of self-recognition indicate a very high level of awareness and are something that only humans, apes, cetaceans, and magpies are otherwise known to do.
Being extremely sensitive creatures, elephants have been known to display behavior patterns similar to post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.
Elephants are able to recognize and distinguish human voices. They can tell the difference between human languages, male and female voices, friendly voices, and those associated with danger.
Unlike stories suggest, elephants are not afraid of mice. They are, however, terrified of bees and ants, so some African farmers protect their fields from elephant damage by lining the borders with beehives.
The word “elephant” comes from the Greek word “elephas” which means “ivory”.
The gestation period of elephants is 22 months. Baby elephants weigh around 100kg on average. The babies can stand up shortly after being born.
The average lifespan of an elephant is from 50 to 70 years. Male African elephants can reach 3m tall and weigh between 4,000 -7,500kg. Asian elephants are slightly smaller, reaching 2.7m tall and weighing 3,000– 6,000kg.
Elephants spend between 12 to 15 hours eating grass, plants, and fruit every single day! They use their long trunks to smell their food and lift it up into their mouth. An adult needs to eat up to 150kg of food a day – that’s 50 tonnes a year!
The trunk of an elephant is a flexible extension of its upper lip and nose. The trunk is an elephant's most versatile tool, used for breathing, smelling, touching, grasping, and producing sound. It's probably the most amazing body part in the animal kingdom!
Elephants have created their very own sunscreen! After a river or swamp bath, they’ll throw mud and sand up and over themselves to protect their skin from the hot, burning sun. Clever!
Sadly, elephants are in trouble. Many are killed by humans for their ivory tusks because they’ve come into conflict with communities or simply for sport. There are far fewer Asian elephants (which are categorized as Endangered) than there are African elephants (listed as Vulnerable – at risk of becoming Endangered). Asian elephants also face threats from tourist attractions where people pay to ride on their backs or watch them paint pictures using their trunks.
Asian elephants are slightly smaller than their African counterparts and have proportionally smaller ears. Their skin is normally dark grey or brown, but they often have pink or yellow marks on their face, ears, and trunk.
The African elephant has the largest brain in the animal kingdom – it can weigh up to 5kg! This is amazing when you consider how much does an elephant weighs (Asian elephants weigh about 5400kg and African elephants up to 6000kg!). The human brain, however, is larger when measured as a proportion of our total body weight.
The average life span of an elephant is 50-70 years, but the oldest known elephant in the world was 86 when he died.
Elephants walk at about 4mph, and they are able to swim long distances. They are, however, the only mammal that can’t jump. How fast can elephants run? Elephants have been clocked to run at 15 mph, however, it is believed that, over a very short sharp distance, elephants could run as fast as 25mph.
Elephants have very sensitive skin and use mud as a form of sunscreen. They need to take regular mud baths in order to protect themselves from sunburn, insect bites, and moisture loss.
Elephant feet are covered in soft padding that helps to support their weight, as well as preventing them from slipping and dulling the sound of their footsteps. As a result, elephants can walk almost silently, despite their huge weight. Furthermore, elephants use their feet to listen to the sub-sonic rumblings made by other elephants through vibrations in the ground. They have been observed to listen by putting their trunks on the ground and carefully positioning their feet.

Friends, hope you liked this post of our Interesting Facts About Elephant You Need to Know. If you liked this post, then you must share it with your friends and Subscribe to us to get updates from our blog. Friends, If you liked our site FactsCrush.Com, then you should Bookmark it as well.