 | In the wild Asian elephants eat grass, bark, roots and leaves.
They also like crops such as bananas grown by farmers, making them a
pest in agricultural areas. |
| Humans are capturing elephants for domestication at an
unsustainable rate often to be used as laborers in the Asian logging
industry.. |
| Poaching for their ivory tusks and habitat destruction are
additional threats. |
| Asian elephants can live in a wide range of habitats, from
jungles to grasslands. |
| FEET--The cylindrical feet consist of reduced phalanges resting
on a pad of elastic tissue. They are very strong and fast. |
| Brain--The cerebral hemisphere is quite convoluted, resembling
that of humans and dolphins. Elephants are very smart animals. |
| Teeth--The elephant's teeth are very interesting. They have a
limited number of very large teeth that move forward in the mouth as
they get older. When the front teeth are worn away they are replaced
from the teeth behind. If an elephant lives long enough to have used
up all of its teeth it then starves to death. |
| In males, a pair of incisors is elongated (growing 17 cm per
year throughout the animal's life) into tusks. These tusks are
the ivory poachers are after. |
| Poaching is less of a problem in Asia where only male elephants
have sizeable tusks and a trade ban has been in force since 1975,
but even here it has not been completely stopped. |
| When in danger, elephants run with their tails held up, which
may signal the danger to the other members of the herd. At full
charge, an elephant can run over 48 km/hr. When a potential predator
such as a lion or tiger threatens a calf, the adults form a
defensive circle with the calf in the middle. |
| Asian elephants have a long history of being hunted by people,
originally for food, later for domestic stock and ivory. |
| Poaching for ivory continues to devastate wild
populations. |
| They also suffer due to habitat loss caused by agriculture and
deforestation. |
| Centuries ago they disappeared from southwestern Asia and most
of China. Currently the number wild Asian elephants continues to
decline very rapidly.. |
| Asian elephants are kept as domestic animals, and can be
successfully bred in captivity. However, because of the difficulty
of keeping, maintaining and working with bull elephants very few
zoos take on the species survival programs. |
| 100 years ago there were at least 100,000 elephants in
Thailand, now sadly that number has dropped to about 5,000 (2,000 in
the wild and 3,000 in captivity) and the population is still
estimated to be falling at over 3% a year. |
| Something must be done to stop this decline or there will be
very few elephants left in the future. |
| Elephants are slow and difficult to breed, only about 4
offspring in a life time, male elephants can be aggressive and
dangerous at certain times (when in musth), few offspring are born,
the young often die before becoming adults. |
| During the 1970s and 80s, the demand for ivory contributed to
the senseless killing of half of the world's elephant population
(from around 1.3 million to 600,000). |
| It is documented that poachers often kill a thousand elephants
a week. |
| The trade in African elephant ivory was banned by the
Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in
1990, but the poaching continues and some evidence suggests it's on
the increase again. |
| I NEVER WANT TO OWN ANYTHING IVORY IF THEY HAVE TO KILL AN
ELEPHANT TO GET THE IVORY!! |
| Elephants are a 'keystone species', and help maintain their
ecosystem. They create vital pathways and knock over trees allowing
smaller species to feed. In droughts they dig down to underground
water supplies. |
| Asian Elephants are excellent swimmers. Elephants have few
natural enemies except man, and they are in extreme danger of
extinction due to loss of habitat and poaching |
| The elephant's ivory tusks are incisors used for digging,
uprooting trees and displaying. |
| Elephants use low frequency sound waves for communication
between members of the herd and individuals outside the herd. These
sounds may carry for distances of up to 10 miles. |
| Only the male Asian elephant has tusks. These large greatly
extended incisor teeth come out on each side of their upper
jaw. |
| The longest recorded tusk was that of an African elephant, 11.5
feet long and 236 pounds! |
| Elephants love to bathe. |
| An elephants bones lack a marrow cavity, but instead have a
spongy material within their bones that distributes the
marrow. |
| The large columnar feet on the elephant allow it to move
surprisingly quickly over rough ground, reaching speeds of 25 mph at
short bursts. |
| The skin does become pinkish white with age. |
| Most of the time the elephants forage in the cool part of the
day, and rest in the shade in the heat. Since they eat such a huge
amount of food and they need to travel great distances, they create
"elephant roads". These elephant roads are used by other
animals too. |
| Elephants breathe through two nostrils at the end of their
trunk, which is an extension of the nose. |
| To get water, the elephant sucks water into the trunk, then
curls the trunk towards the mouth and squirts the water into it. |
| Elephants use their tusks for lots of different things.
They use them to dig for water, remove bark from trees, move fallen
trees and branches, mark trees, rest their trunk on, fight with,
various kinds of work. |
| Elephants are left or right tusked, just as humans are left or
right handed. |
| Adult elephants eat about 330 pounds of food a day. They must
drink water every day and are never far from a water source. |
| An elephant's versatile trunk can pick up food, touch and
greet other elephants, and draw up water |
| The Asian elephant has 5 toes on the foreleg and 4 toes on each
hind leg. |
| Elephants are often seen spraying water and dirt on their back
to keep cool and clean, this also helps to get rid of of
insects. |
| In the wild, elephants love to be by water. They often cross rivers
by walking on the bottom and using their trunks as a snorkel. |
| People experienced in looking after elephants are getting fewer every
year. |
