Happy World Elephant Day! Elephants are popular animals in our house. I’ve always liked them, going back to reading Babar stories at our tiny local library, and my daughter has shown a special affection for them in recent years. In honor of the occasion, here are some fun facts about elephants.
Elephants are herbivores, but contrary to popular belief, they do not like peanuts. Their preferred diet consists of grasses, roots, fruit and bark and they eat a lot of it. A fully grown elephant can consume up to 300 pounds of food per day, and it can take a while to consume that much. Elephants eat for up to 16 hours per day.
African elephants are larger than Asian elephants, and pretty much everyone else. In fact, African elephants are the largest land mammals on the planet. They can weigh up to 14,000 pounds.
Female African elephants have the longest pregnancy of any land mammals, lasting a crazy long 22 months.
A baby Asian elephant weighs approximately 200 pounds at birth, stands about three feet tall and is also full of insane doses of cuteness.
An elephant uses its trunk to breath, smell, trumpet, drink and grab items. To perform all those functions, the trunk has approximately 100,000 different muscles as well as a feature on the end that works like a finger and allows the elephant to grasp small items. Asian elephants have one of these features, African elephants have two.
Elephants can live up to 70 years.
Unlike most mammals, elephants cannot jump because their legs are too slender.
Elephants live in groups. Females live in groups of up to fifteen elephants, all members of the same family and led by a matriarch. The male elephants leave the group between ages 12-15 and they live in all-male groups.
Elephants will throw sand on their backs and on their head. They do that to keep them from getting sunburned and to keep bugs off,” Tony Barthel, curator of the Elephant House and the Cheetah Conservation Station at Smithsonian’s National Zoo, told Smithsonian.com.
Asian elephants are smaller in size than African elephants, and they have straight ears whereas African elephants have fan-shaped ears.
Wondering why they have tusks? Elephants use tusks to dig roots from the dirt, find water and to pull bark off of trees. They also use them when fighting. Sadly, they are hunted for their ivory tusks despite such trade being outlawed. Other threats to elephants include conflict with humans as well as habitat loss and degradation. You can read what the World Wildlife Fund is doing to help save elephants, click here.
Sources: Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic, SOS Elephants, World Wildlife Fund
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