Fascinating Fun Facts About Elephants

Here are some amazing elephant facts and news that may be interested to you:

1. An elephant is one of the few four legged animals, which cannot run or jump.
2. At birth, the baby elephants are blind and they depend on their trunk and their mothers to help them.
3. Females can mate and have babies until they are around 50 years old, and they tend to give birth every 2.5 to 4 years.
4. Elephants feed around 16 hours a day and they consume around 300 to 600 pounds of vegetation every day.
5. Male elephants go through bouts of aggression, which last for short periods.  Hence, female elephants are kept at the zoos and used in the circus, as they are gentler in nature.
6. Elephants are social animals and they are often seen touching and caressing one another and playing around with the trunks.
7. An elephants tusk grows up to around 10 feet and weighs around 200 pounds.
8. Elephants cool themselves by fanning their ears. This cool down the blood in their ears, which completely cools them off.
9. Despite the size of elephant ears the quality of hearing is poor! The body at the back of an elephant ear is surprisingly soft, and called the knuckle, this area is used by trainers to steer and give commands to the elephant. The ears on an African elephant are flapped to help keep the animal cool
10. Elephants are herbivores, they eat varying types of vegetation including grass, leaves, fruits, and bark
11. Elephants have a walking speed of approximately 4 mph. A surprising fact is that they are able to swim for long distances!
12. Male elephants leave the herd when they around 14 years old to form their own male herd.
13. Adult elephants sleep while standing up while some baby elephants lie down to sleep.
14. The gestation period of an elephant is about 22 months, the longest for any land animal.
15. Elephants have warm greeting ceremonies to welcome back a fellow member of the herd if it has been away for a long time.
16. As elephants have a great sense of smell, they are able to recognize people by their smell even after many years, but their eyes are small and their eyesight is poor.
17. As a means of communication, elephants purr like cats. The frequency of their purrs and the sound they make is way below the human frequency and hence, isn’t audible to the human ear.

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Why elephant has a trunk?

Learn all elephant facts about elephant trunk you wanted by this article:

An elephant's trunk is essentially a modified nose comprising muscle and no bone. When the trunk is used for drinking, as in the photo above, the elephant sucks water into the trunk and then squirts the contents into its mouth. In adults, the trunk when used like this can hold about 10 to 12 liters.
Elephants can't drink directly through their trunks as this would be like sucking water through the nose, which would cause them to drown.However, he did find it uncomfortable, because he had to go down on bended knees to reach anything.
One day, Elephant was at the river, and was kneeling down drinking from the fresh water.
Crocodile swam past, and saw Elephant at the water's edge.  Crocodile was feeling particularly hungry, and saw an opportunity for a good meal.
Crocodile swam stealthily up to where Elephant was, and suddenly lunged out of the water and grabbed Elephant by the nose.
Elephant was startled, and tried to pull away, but Crocodile had a firm grip on his nose.

Crocodile used all his weight and strength to try to pull Elephant into the water.
However, Elephant was also very strong, and he dug his feet into the bank and fought back.
The 2 battled for hours, and with every pull and tug, Elephant's nose stretched a little more. Eventually, Crocodile became too tired to pull any more, and let go of Elephant.
Elephant ran off, with his now very long nose hanging down in front of his feet.  He was distraught, and hid in the bush as he was too embarrassed to face the other animals.
Soon, Elephant realised that his new stretched nose was more useful than his previously small snout.  He was able to reach food and drink without kneeling any more, and could even reach high branches and pull them down to eat the fruit and leaves.
All the other Elephants soon realised the benefits of having a long trunk, and one by one they too visited the river and taunted the Crocodile to try and pull them into the water.
In short, trunk helps an elephant access better quality food and drink water.
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