THE AFRICAN ELEPHANTS

Wednesday, 31.May 2023

Two genetically different African species exist: the savanna elephant and the forest elephant, with a number of characteristics that differentiate them both. The African savanna elephant is the largest elephant species, while the Asian forest elephant and the African forest elephant are of a comparable, smaller size.

The best four places to see elephants in Tanzania:

The African Elephant is without a doubt one of the most recognizable and fascinating creatures to be encountered on a Tanzania wildlife Safari. For million of years, these beautiful, magnificent, and enormous animals have reamed the African plain. We are incredibly fortunate that Tanzania is home to one of Africa’s most numerous and substantial elephant population. Sadly due to interactions with human habits overlap and the expansions of the ivory trade in Asia, elephant populations are fast declining and soon there may not be enough African elephants to support the population.

Certainly! Elephants are known for their highly social behavior, with intricate communication and strong family bonds. They typically live in groups led by a matriarch, or female leader, and they are known to mourn the loss of their herd members.

In terms of physical behavior, elephants are known for their impressive size and strength. They use their trunks for a wide range of activities, from drinking water and birthing to grasping and manipulating objects. They are also excellent swimmers and can travel long distance on foot.

HOW DO ELEPHANTS SLEEP

Humans and animals need to do several things in daily life, eat, reproduce and the most important is sleep. Sleep is absolutely essential for health. To feel rested and refreshed while awake, humans require 7-8 hours of sleep, but how many hours do these large mammals need to sleep per day? And how do they sleep?

Elephants are the largest land mammal captive elephants may have different sleep patterns of elephants living in the wild. In captivity, sleep 3 to 7 hours at night lying down foe 1 to 5 hours at time and getting up to feed between naps. But in the wild in their natural surroundings the elephant rested for only 2 hours, mainly at night . the elephants in the wild sometimes went up to 46 hours without sleep while walking for distance to avoid threat such as lion or human poachers. African and Asian elephant still manage to lie down to sleep, and both are sleeping on their sides for long periods, or taking a nap while standing, learning against a tree for support.

The elephant appeared to experience rapid eye movement, sleep is believed to be critical in forming memories. It is a type of sleep seen across the animal kingdom in mammals and most mammals go into REM sleep every day. 2 hours of sleep a night for an elephant minght sound unbelievable but it’s not just the number of hours they spend a sleep that’s important – it’s the quality of those hours.

Trunks and tusks

Elephant ears radiate heat to help keep this large animals cool, but sometimes the African heat is too much. Elephants are fond of water and enjoy showring by sucking water into their trunks and spraying it all over their body. Afterwards they often spray their skin with a protective coating of dust.

An elephant’s trunk is actually a long nose used for smelling, breathing, trumpeting, drinking water, and also for grabbing things especially a potential meal. The trunk alone contains about 40,000 muscles. African elephants have two fingerlike features on the end of their trunks that they can use to grab small items. (Asian elephants have just one)

Both male and female African elephants have tusks, which are continuously growing teeth. Savannah elephants have curving tusks, while the tusks of forest elephants are straight. They use these tusks to dig for food and water and strip bark from trees. Males whose tusks tend to be larger than the female’, also use their tusks to battle one another.

Elephants live a highly organized social structure referred to as a matriarchal herd. The herd is typically composed of up to ten females and their young ones. All of the females in the herd are directly related to the matriarch, who is typically the oldest and largest female. The males beyond the age of maturity are with the herd only during mating.

African elephants are capable of making a wide variety of vocal sounds, such as grunts, purrs, bellows whistles, and the obvious trumpeting. elephants are also capable of making low frequency sound that are below the human range of hearing; this allows wandering individuals within the herd as well as several different herds to stay in direct contact over distances of many miles

Female elephants are one of the few mammals other than humans who live beyond their reproductive years. The typical cow will end her reproductive period between 45 – 50 years, during this post reproductive time she assist with the care of other young ones.

Elephants Diet

Elephant eat roots, grasses, fruits, and bark. An adult elephant can consume up to 300 pounds of food in a single day. These hungry animals do not sleep much, roaming great distances while foraging for the large quantities of food that they require to sustain their massive bodies.

An African elephants range throughout the savannas of sub-saharan Africa and the rainforest of central and West Africa. The continent’s northernmost elephants are found in Mali’s Sahel desert. The small nomadic herd of Mali elephants migrate in a circular route through the desert in search of water.

Because elephants eats so much, they’re increasingly coming into contact with humans. Elephants can destroy an entire season of crops in a single night. A number of conservation programs work with farmers to help them protect their crops and provide compensation when an elephant does raid them.

Threats to survival

Poaching for the illegal ivory trade is the biggest threat to African elephants’ survival. Before the Europeans began colonizing Africa, there may have been as many as millions of elephants. By the early 20^th century, their numbers had dropped to 10 million. Hunting continued to increase, by 1970, there numbers were down to 1.3 million. Between 1970 and 1990, hunting and poaching put the African elephants at risk of extinction, reducing its population by another half.

In the years since, poaching has continue to threaten both species: Savanna elephants declined by 30 percent between 2007 and 2014, while forest elephants declined by 64 percent from 2002 to 2011 as poaching worsened in central and West Africa. In 2021, the international Union for conservation of nature recognized them as separate species for the first time, listing savanna elephants as endangered and forest elephants as critically endangered. As few as 400,000 remain today.

Compounding the problem is how long it takes for elephants to reproduce. With reproductive rates hovering around 5 – 6 percent, there are simply not enough calves being born to make up for the losses from poaching.

African elephants are also losing their habits as the human population grows and people convert land for agriculture and development. Elephants need a lot of room, so habitat destruction and fragmentation not only makes it harder for them to find food, water, and each other, but also puts them in increased conflicts with humans.

Conservation

The decision to recognize African elephants as two separate species is seen as an important step for conservation, as highlights the different challenges that each species faces. Scientists hope that the listing will bring more attention to forest elephants, which have often been overlooked by government and donors when grouped together with more visible savannah elephants.

African elephants are protected to varying dehrees in all the counties of their geographic range. They’re also protected under international environment agreements, CITES and Convention on the Conservation of Migratory species. They have been recent efforts to bring re-legalize the international trade in ivory, but those so far have failed.

To curb poaching, stopping the illegal trade is key. Advocates have lauched campaigns that address both the suppy side (poaching) and the demand side (people who buy ivory) there has been some progress in recent years, especially on the demand side; in 2015, china believd to be the world’s biggest illegal and legal ivory market agreed to a “near complete” ban on the domestic trade of ivory. Since the ban went into effect public demand for ivory seems to have fallen.