Animal Unique | Elephant | Elephants are the largest living land animals on Earth today. Three species of elephants are recognized: the African bush elephant, African forest elephant and the Indian or Asian elephant. The African elephant is the largest animal on land. The bull weighs 12,000 pounds and is 11 meters high. The cow weighs 8,000 pounds is 9 meters high. The largest African elephant ever found weighed 24, 000 pounds and was 13 meters high. The Asian elephant is smaller than the African elephant. The adult bull is 9 to 10 1/2 feet high and weighing up to 4 short tons. The cow is 8 meters high and weighs about 3.3 short tons. The largest Asian bull measured 10 feet 8 inches long.
The most distinctive feature of an elephant is the great multi-stem. The strain can the elephant to breathe, smell to locate, drink and grab and manipulate objects of a small coin to a large tree branch. The tribe is used to make sounds, or comfort to greet other elephants, and even accompany a calf as a snorkel while swimming. The elephant tusks are long, curved teeth. They are made of ivory. The African bull tusks can grow 6 to 8 feet long. Elephants have small eyes and a short neck. The tail is small in comparison with the rest of the body and is about 3 1/3 meter long long hairs at the end.
Elephants thick skin is gray and wrinkled. The African elephant has dark gray skin and the Asian elephant has light gray skin. Elephants are the only animal that has a trunk for a nose to have. The trunk is a combined nose and upper lip. It has no bones. The trunk of an adult elephant is about 5 feet long. Unlike most mammals, which grow baby teeth and replace them with a fixed set of adult teeth, elephants have cycles of tooth rotation throughout their lives. An elephant's legs are roughly the shape of columns or pillars, as they should be to support the bulk. The elephant has less muscle strength to stand because of the straight legs and large padded feet.
Elephants swim well, but can not run, jump, or gallop. They have two courses: a walk and a faster gait that is similar to running. The big hits ears of an elephant are also very important for temperature control. Elephant ears are made of a very thin layer of skin and cartilage rich network of blood vessels. On hot days, elephants will always flapping their ears, creating a slight breeze. Origin Africans and stayed near the equator, where it is warmer. Therefore, they have bigger ears. Asians live farther north, in slightly cooler climates, and thus have smaller ears.
Elephants live in a structured social order. The social life of male and female elephants are very different. The females spend their entire lives in close-knit family of mothers, daughters, sisters and aunts made. These groups are led by the eldest female, or matriarch. Adult males, on the other hand, usually live solitary life. Elephants are supposed to belong equally to the field of intelligence in cetaceans and nonhuman primates. A wide variety of behaviors associated with intelligence are attributed to elephants, including those associated with grief, making music, art, altruism, allomothering, play, use of tools, compassion and self-awareness.
Elephants are herbivores and spend up to 16 hours a day eating plants. Their diets are highly variable, both season and across habitats and regions. Elephants are primarily browsers, eating leaves, bark and fruits of trees and shrubs, but they can also eat significant quantities of grasses and herbs. Elephants can have serious consequences for the ecosystems they occupy both positive and negative effects on other species, especially with their foraging activities. By pulling down trees to eat leaves, breaking branches and roots from it, they reduce woody cover, creating clearings in forests, conversion of forests to savannas and converting savannas to grasslands. These changes tend to benefit at the expense of herbivore browsers.
The threat to the African elephant by the ivory trade is unique to the species. Larger, long life, slow-breeding animals, like elephants, are more susceptible to overhunting than other animals. They can not hide, and it takes many years for an elephant to grow and reproduce. Another threat to the elephants' survival in general is the ongoing cultivation of their habitats with increasing risk of conflicts of interest with human cohabitants. Africa first official reserve, Kruger National Park, became one of the most famous and successful world's national parks. Elephant hunting, both legal and illegal, has some unexpected effects on elephant anatomy as well. African ivory hunters, by killing only elephant tusks, have a much greater chance of mating to elephants with small tusks or no tusks at all.
Elephants have been working animals used in various capacities by humans. Elephants are ubiquitous in Western popular culture as emblems of the exotic because of their unique appearance and size distinguishes them from other animals and because, like other African animals including giraffe, rhino, hippo and they are unknown to western audiences. War elephants were used by armies in the Indian subcontinent, the Warring States of China and later by the Persian Empire. This use was by Hellenistic armies after Alexander the Great experienced their worth against king Porus, notably in the Ptolemaic and Seleucid diadoch empires.
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