I recently finished a novel in which elephants played a
major part. It made me want to know more about these huge mammals.
In a way, I could say that elephants have always been a part
of my life. I saw them in childhood at zoos and circuses. Was fascinated by
what little I learned of them. Believed, like others, that there was such a
thing as an elephant graveyard where elephants went to die. This, by the way,
is not true. Still, reading the novel and the list of books at the back that
the author had used for her research, I realized that I really knew very little
about elephants.
I’ve been fascinated for years and read books about “Leaky’s
Angels” who studied the great apes. Now I realize elephants are equally
interesting.
The world ‘ele-phant’ means ‘great arch.’ Ancestors to
modern elephants show up in the fossil records 45 to 55 million years ago.
These early elephants had no trunk. (Remember Kipling’s story “The Elephant’s
Child”?) Hairy mammoths and mastodons were only two of the later versions of
elephants.
The three modern species of elephant are African savannah,
African forest, and Asian.
Similarly to humans, elephant mothers keep their young with
them for a long time. An elephant is considered to be in the ‘baby’ stage for
about fourteen years. The herd helps to take care of all the young. In adolescence
(between age ten to nineteen) the males begin to leave the herd, at first just
for short periods of time, but eventually to join a group of other young males
or to live alone. The females stay in their birth herd. Females start to breed around age fifteen to
sixteen and can have up to twelve young in their lifetimes. Herds are generally led by the eldest female,
the matriarch. Males come into mating age between thirty to thirty-five years.
Elephants can live for up to seventy years. Mature males can weigh up to seven
tonnes, while females can reach 3.5 tonnes.
Elephants have very complex methods of communication. Up to
seventy different calls have been identified by researchers. These can range
from loud trumpets to quiet rumbles. Elephants can also communicate by infrasound
or low frequency sound that humans can’t discern. These sounds can be heard by
other elephants up to fourteen kilometers away. If you’d like to experience
some elephant sounds that humans can hear, go to “The Elephant Listening
Project” on line.
Although elephants once lived across all of Africa, now they
inhabit only 37 African and 13 Asian countries.
There are many elephant researchers working among wild
elephants and in elephant sanctuaries. You can easily find these on line. I’ll be looking there as well as checking
bookstores for more information about the world’s largest land mammals, complex
and endlessly fascinating, as well as in need of help to continue to survive.
