Which elephants have tusks

The enormous ears of elephants act as cooling devices. The gigantic earflaps which can measure up to 2 square metres When the animal flaps its ears, the blood temperature lowers by as much as 5 degrees Celsius 9 degrees Fahrenheit. Wrinkles are also related to the need for these large animals to keep their body temperature down.

Wrinkles increase the surface area, so there is more skin to wet when the animal bathes. All the cracks and crevices trap moisture, which then takes much longer to evaporate. Thus, a wrinkly elephant keeps cooler for longer than it would with smooth skin. An adult elephant will drink about liters of water per day and this can sometimes be drunk during a single visit.

Each trunkful may amount to between 4 and 8 liters. Elephants are herbivores plant eaters , but they cannot digest cellulose, the substance that makes up much plant matter. They spend about three-quarters of their time, day and night, selecting, picking, preparing and eating food. An adult elephant in the wild will eat in the region of to Kg to lb.

The number of plant species eaten by any one elephant may vary but it is likely to be more than fifty. About per cent of elephant diet is grass, if it is available. Like humans and apes, an elephant's choice of food-plants will be determined partly by what grows locally, partly by what was learned from its mother, and partly by what it has discovered by trying novel food items.

Elephants also select their meals taking into account the time it takes to prepare each mouthful. Eating long grass is probably the easiest and quickest way for an elephant to fill up! On the other hand, one of the most time-consuming food-items for elephants to prepare is bark.

With larger trees, the elephant drives a tusk between the bark and the sapwood and then yanks a strip off the tree with its trunk. The soft wood of some trees such as the baobab is also eaten. Such tusking sometimes destroys the whole tree. Elephants can give birth at any time of the year if food is plentiful all year round. In areas where food is scarce during dry seasons, most births occur during rainy seasons.

This ensures that the mother has plenty to eat while she is suckling her calf. Females between 14 - 45 years may give birth to calves approximately every four years with the mean interbirth intervals increasing to five years by age 52 and six years by age Interbirth intervals of up to 13 years may occur depending upon habitat conditions and population densities.

The mean calving interval varies from population to population, with high density populations or otherwise nutritionally stressed populations exhibiting longer intervals between births. After 22 months growing inside its mother's womb, a newborn baby elephant weighs more than the average adult human being. Female calves weigh kg - lb. Males are heavier and weigh up to kg lb. An adult bull savanna elephant can have a shoulder height of 3.

Females are smaller, weighing up to 3, Kg 7, lb. Elephants are unusual among mammals in that they continue to grow throughout their life, although their rate of growth slows after they reach sexual maturity.

Elephant home ranges vary from population to population and habitat to habitat. Individual home ranges vary from 15 to 3, square kilometers , square miles. Elephants are not territorial although they utilize specific home areas during particular times of the year. Elephants communicate with each other in many ways and with all their senses.

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The era of greyhound racing in the U. Tusks are teeth—upper incisors to be exact. According to Dr. Male tusks can grow to be seven times the weight of female tusks as they age. Those males then no longer pass on their genes for large tusks. Poole notes that even if younger, smaller males with the potential to develop large tusks remain in the population, they will not be the primary breeders given that age, body size, and musth—a frenzied, sexually charged state for male elephants during which hormone levels are elevated—determine how often and successfully a male elephant breeds with females.

Smaller tusks are not the only genetic consequence faced by elephant populations in Africa and Asia due to heavy poaching. Over several decades, researchers have documented an increase in the percentage of tuskless males and females in a number of elephant populations.

A elephant conservation plan in Uganda reported a higher-than-normal percentage of tuskless elephants in Queen Elizabeth National Park and singled out poaching as the main cause. Whereas a normal level of tusklessness in an elephant population is somewhere between 3 percent and 4 percent, according to the Ugandan report, a survey of Queen Elizabeth National Park revealed tusklessness in the elephant population to be between 9 percent and 25 percent.

For African elephants, tuskless males have a much harder time breeding and do not pass on their genes as often as tusked males.

In heavily poached populations, says Poole, the ratio of tuskless animals in the population increases as poaching continues. You can see this in almost any population that has experienced a wave of heavy poaching, in Gorongosa [in Mozambique], for example, or Selous [in Tanzania].

One might go a step further and contend that wiping out elephants—be they big tuskers or not—amounts to ecological sabotage as well. Elephants perform an important role in the ecosystem, as landscape architects—pushing down trees, establishing trails, and creating new patches of grassland for other wildlife—and as biotic agents that disperse seeds long distances through dense forests and across the savanna.

It boils down to this: stop the killing, stop the trafficking, and stop the demand.