Did you know that unlike most mammals, elephants can’t jump?
Elephants evolved to walk on their tiptoes, supported by flat pads of fat.
That helps them carry all that weight,
but doesn’t let them catch any air.
Then again, when you weigh 8,000 pounds, why would you need to jump?
Elephants have captured the hearts and imaginations of humans throughout history.
Today they’re some of the most beloved animals out there.
But how much do you really know about these huge, tusked herbivores?
Who shows up to an elephant family reunion?
Did the rhinoceros or hippopotamus come to mind?
Actually, what these animals have in common,
like their size and thick skin,
are what we call convergent evolution.
That’s when distantly related organisms independently evolve similar adaptations to their environment.
So what is the elephant’s closest living kin?
Believe it or not…it’s these guys: hyraxes and sea cows.
DNA sequencing has revealed that elephants belong in a superorder
called Afrotheria along with their closest relatives,
including aardvarks, elephant shrews, golden moles, tenrecs,
and closest of all, hyraxes and sea cows.
Surprising as it may seem, these cousins do actually have a lot in common.
Manatees, for example, have prehensile upper lips
that work like a mini version of a trunk,
grasping and pulling food into their mouths.
They also have remnants of elephant-like toenails on their flippers.
Hyraxes have hoof-like nails and large tusk-looking incisor teeth.
And like elephants, they have complex communication and social lives.
An elephant’s tusks–which are actually its very, very long incisor teeth–
keep growing throughout its lifetime,
as new layers of tissue develop and push the existing layers further away from its jaw.
The new layers contain chemical isotopes from whatever the elephant was eating at the time they formed,
capturing information about the animal’s location and health over its lifetime.
Scientists were able to use this data to reconstruct
the life story of a woolly mammoth—a close extinct relative of the Asian elephant.
Analyzing the isotopes in a mammoth tusk sample, the researchers
mapped its movements and diet across thousands of miles in prehistoric Alaska,
helping shed light on elephant evolution.
With the largest brains of any land animal,
and trunks strong enough to uproot trees yet nimble enough to pick up individual leaves,
it’s no wonder that elephants are great at problem solving.
They’ve been known to use tools to do things like getting rid of pests and defending themselves.
The stick is a great example.
Elephants can trim a stick to a useful length
for scratching their backs, holding down tree branches, and swatting away pests.
Elephants can also use their ingenuity to avoid doing work for humans.
In Southeast Asia, elephants that perform labor for human handlers during the day
are known to stuff their “work bells” with leaves at night
so their handlers can’t find them when it’s time to get to work in the morning.
Elephant herds are groups of closely related females and their young.
Male elephants, or bulls, leave the herd as teenagers.
A herd’s matriarch, an older female leader,
helps the herd survive by sharing her hard-earned wisdom,
like remembering the locations of faraway watering holes in times of drought.
These family groups grow very attached.
Mothers are extremely protective of their calves,
and younger females are attentive babysitters.
Elephants show their affection through touch,
especially with their trunks, as well as through gesture and sound.
Individual elephants remember their feelings for one another even when separated for years.
Although rarely documented, when a family member dies, elephants appear to grieve the loss.
They’ll gather around the body and touch it with their trunks, nudge it, or pick it up.
Elephants use a truly impressive range of sounds to express themselves,
including rumbles, trumpets, roars, and more.
They’ll use particular kinds of sounds to scare off predators,
comfort distressed calves,
decide which direction to move in,
and greet relatives they haven’t seen in a while.
Some elephants use contact calls
–deep rumbling sounds–
to get in touch with family members who are out of sight.
These calls can reach up to nearly a mile away!
Studies even show that elephants can specifically recognize the sounds of their relatives.
Elephants can also make a low-frequency infrasonic rumbling—
a sound that humans can’t hear, but other elephants can detect with their feet.
It’s kind of like how you feel the vibrations of a speaker at a concert,
except elephants can detect their friends’ vibrations up to 20 miles away!
We have a long history together.
Elephants can learn over 100 commands,
and humans have historically used elephants’ size, strength, and smarts
to our advantage for warfare, work, and entertainment.
Globally, humans are moving away from using elephants as work animals.
Many places in the United States have banned using wild animals like elephants in circuses.
And some zoos are phasing out elephant enclosures,
due in large part to societal pressure
and growing awareness of elephants’ complex social needs.
But elephants can still have an important economic impact while living in their natural habitat.
For example, they can be a big draw for ecotourism
–responsible travel to admire the natural world–
which can benefit local economies while promoting conservation efforts.
This is just a small peek into the fascinating, and sometimes secretive, world of elephants.
Imagine how much else there is to know about these complex and charismatic giants.