Why the long face…?

In 2019, I was on a game drive in Tanzania when my driver saw an elephant tusk by the side of the road. He stopped the vehicle, picked it up and put it on the back seat so that he could hand it in to the authorities.

Out of curiosity, I looked up how much that 17 kg tusk would’ve been worth on the black market: at $1,800 a kilo, it would’ve cost $30,000!

That’s one weigh of measuring the value of elephants, of course, but it’s not my own.

For me, it’s all about capturing the best possible pictures.

Admittedly, it’s not easy, but I’d rather sell an elephant print for $1,000 than an elephant tusk for $30,000!

If you want a few tips on how to shoot an elephant, just take a look at my blog post.

Basic facts

Order: Proboscidea

Family: Elephantidae

Species: African bush elephant, also known as the African savanna elephant

Scientific name: Loxodonta africana

Subspecies: None. The African forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis) and Asian elephant (Elephas maximus), also known as the Asiatic elephant, are actually separate species

Mass: 10.4 t (11.5 short tons)

Height at shoulder: 3.96 m (13.0 ft)

Length of head and body: 7.32 m (24 ft)

Appearance: Quadruped mammal with grey, wrinkled skin, a long trunk and ivory tusks on either side.

Top speed: 25 mph (40 km/h)

Gestation period: 22 months

Lifespan: 70-75 years

IUCN Red List Status: Endangered

Population: 415,428 (including African forest elephants in 2016), decreasing

Habitat: Forest, Forest, Savanna, Shrubland, Grassland, Wetlands (inland), Desert

Distribution: 37 countries in Africa

Habitat

Elephants used to be found all over Africa, but their current range is only around 15% of the historic area.

They can inhabit a wide variety of environments, from montane forest, miombo and mopane woodland, thicket, savanna and grasslands to arid deserts.

They can also live anywhere from sea level up to 2,500 metres.

Elephants are herbivorous and live on grasses, creepers and herbs plus leaves and bark during the dry season. They also go to salt licks and other places to get the minerals they need.

They eat around 350 pounds of vegetation a day.

Elephants drink 180–230 litres (40–50 imperial gallons or 50–60 US gallons) of water every day.

Breeding

Females come to sexual maturity at 11 years of age, and they are in oestrus for between two and six days. For males, it happens when they are around 15 years old.

Elephants tend to mate during the rainy season, and male elephants in ‘musth’ tend to be particularly successful.

Musth is a period when bull elephants become very aggressive and search for mating opportunities with females.

You can tell an elephant is in musth by the oily fluid that runs down the side of his face from a special gland and by the fact that urine often dribbles from his penis.

Elephants in musth listen out for mating calls from females and leave trails of pungent urine.

Males compete for mating rights (whether they’re in musth or not), and once the female has chosen her partner, he will try to keep all the others away.

Females may mate with more than one bull in each oestrus cycle.

Although elephants don’t mate for life, a female may mate with the same bull over and over again, and bulls sometimes ‘guard’ their females.

Copulation lasts around two minutes.

Gestation lasts 22 months, and the mother gives birth standing up, usually in the presence of other elephants.

Females give birth every three to five years.

Based on measurements taken in captivity, calves weigh between 100 and 120 kg (220 and 260 lb) at birth and put on about 0.5 kg (1.1 lb) per day.

It takes them around half an hour to stand up and another half an hour to start to walk.

They suckle from their mother for anything up to five years, but they start feeding on their own from three months onwards.

Male calves feed more and therefore grow faster in the first three years, but after that their mothers refuse to nurse them more often than their female calves.

Communication

Elephants are very intelligent and sociable animals, and they communicate in a variety of different ways:

• Acoustic. Elephants produce high and low frequency sounds, but the low frequency ‘rumbles’ travel further in the bush. Specifically, elephants are able to make a number of different noises using their vocal chords and the hyoid apparatus at the base of the tongue:

  • rumble

  • snort

  • bark

  • roar

  • cry

  • etc

• Visual. They their heads, eyes, mouth, ears, tusks, trunk, tail, feet and even their whole body to signal to one another and to other animals:

  • charging

  • flapping ears

  • kicking up dust

  • tossing trunk

  • the musth walk

  • standing tall

  • trunk calling

• Tactile. They are very tactile animals, and they touch one another for a number of reasons:

  • Aggressive

  • Affiliative

  • Coalition Building

  • Conflict & Confrontation

  • Advertisement & Attraction

  • Courtship

  • Social Play

  • Calf Reassurance & Protection

  • Calf Nourishment & Weaning

  • Attentive

• Seismic. Elephants can pick up vibrations of the sounds they make through their trunks and feet. Both have Pacinian corpuscles that are acutely sensitive to Rayleigh waves that are transmitted through the ground, and elephants have been observed to ‘point’ their bodies towards the source and change their behaviour accordingly.

• Chemical. Elephants have a very good sense of smell, controlled by 5,000 genes - which is twice the number in dogs and five times the number in humans! The trunk is its most important tool for investigating the environment, and it has around 150,000 muscular sub-units.

Another thing that helps elephants communicate is their excellent memory.

They say that an elephant never forgets - well, that’s pretty close to the truth: an elephant can remember and recognise from 500 to 1000 other elephants!

Threats

The elephant population is in decline and faces threats from predators as well as man.

The IUCN deems the African bush elephant to be in its ‘Endangered’ category, and it faces a number of threats to its existence:

• predation (mostly from lions)

• habitat loss and fragmentation

• poaching (particularly the larger bull elephants for meat and their ivory tusks)

• anthrax spores (in November at the end of the dry season at Etosha) and various other toxins

The major threat is and always has been poaching. An African elephant is poached every 15 minutes, so it’s not wonder they’re in such trouble…

Sources: Wikipedia, IUCN, Elephant Voices

If you’d like to order a framed print of one of my wildlife photographs, please visit the Prints page.

If you’d like to book a lesson or order an online photography course, please visit my Lessons and Courses pages.