African Jungles, Plains, and Waterways
GREETING. Elephants “shake hands” by putting their trunk tips in each other’s mouths, perhaps picking up telltale tastes and smells this way.
Vital Stats
ORDER Proboscidae
FAMILY Elephantidae
SCIENTIFIC NAME Loxodonta africana
HABITAT
Prefers the edge between grassland and forest, especially near rivers; also found in deep forests, open savannas, wet marshes, thornbush, and semi-desert scrub
SIZE Length, 20–24 ft.
Shoulder height, 10–13 ft
WEIGHT 4,850–16,534 lb
Heaviest ever recorded, 22,050 lb
MAXIMUM AGE 70 years in captivity
You would think an animal as colossal as an elephant would be something of a brute. Certainly, if we humans tipped the scales at 12 to 14 thousand pounds apiece, we’d find a way to throw our weight around. But not elephants; despite their awesome payload, the world’s largest land mammals are downright gentle.
Their weight is magically distributed on four squishy footpads that leave relatively dainty tracks. Their javelin-length tusks, sharp enough to puncture the sheet metal of a Land Rover, are more often used for peaceful pursuits such as root digging, peeling the edible bark of trees, drilling for water, and suggestively nudging the female before mating. Even their skin, at 1 1/2 inches thick, is really very fragile— so much so that zookeepers must scrub the elephants daily to keep their skin clean and well-conditioned.
Elephants lead gentle lives as well, characterized by cooperation rather than conflict. In their 50 to 70 years of life, elephants come to know one another intimately; every birth is a cause for celebration, and when a fellow member dies, all the elephants in the group struggle to lift the fallen one with their trunks.
Their bonds are so strong, in fact, that when hunters shoot at family groups, separated members will run toward their imperiled family, not away.
The basic unit of this close-knit society is the cow-calf group, made up of a matriarch or leader (usually the oldest cow), her adult female daughters, and their immature offspring of both sexes. The matriarch’s sisters, cousins, and their offspring sometimes join in as well, bringing the total to as high as 24 members, though the average is fewer than 10. The social hierarchy in cow-calf groups is based on size and age, with the largest and oldest females at the top and the smallest and youngest coming in last. Adolescent males determine their own ranking order through head-butting contests, where strength and temperament
are as important as size and age.
Most females will stay with their original or natal group for a lifetime, except for the occasional few that develop a following and leave to become their own leaders. Males, on the other hand, are destined to leave their natal group as soon as they mature (at 10 to 20 years). Some don’t even make it that long; females that grow tired of the males’ rowdy behavior may oust them at any time. So begins the wandering life of the bull elephant. It’s a solitary life for the most part, spent crisscrossing the range in search of female mates. The only time you’ll see a bull with a family group is when he finds a cow in heat or if he happens to be near the group when they are feeding or migrating. The rest of the time, lone bulls pal around only with other bulls, forming loose bachelor herds whose members change from day to day.
Besides the cow-calf groups and bull groups, there are composite aggregations called kinship groups that may contain as many as 70 animals.
These kinship groups or clans are made up of two to five splinter groups, subsets of the family that have broken off from the original cow-calf group but remain in the neighborhood, intermingling from time to time. After the rainy season, clans from miles around may come together in large herds of several hundred to as many as 2,000 individuals to feast in areas of new growth.
Whether it’s the five animals at your zoo or a herd of 2,000 on the veldt, the same rules of congeniality and loyalty apply. You’ll notice that as family members feed, bathe, or move from place to place, they act as one, remaining within 50 yards of the matriarch. Even when bushes separate them, they keep in contact with special calls and probably scent cues. When danger threatens the elephant group, the members bunch together to present a united front, with the matriarch front-and-center and the calves tucked behind the adults. All the members, large and small, hold their trunks in a tea-spout position, sniffing the air for danger. If the situation warrants it, the lead cow may charge, or the whole group may stampede at once, trumpeting and shaking their great gray heads.
This furious mob can also show unusual tenderness. When a calf falters and falls, for instance, the whole herd pauses until the mother and various helpers have raised the calf and steadied it. This communal defense and care of the young, sick, and injured means that elephants have more in common with primates (and therefore with us) than they do with species in their own order.
TEA-SPOUT POSITION. Curious or concerned, elephants “periscope up” to sniff out danger.