African Elephant

The African elephant is the largest animal that walks the Earth, an ecosystem engineer that reshapes whole landscapes, and one of the few animals with a demonstrable understanding of death. It is also still being killed for its teeth.

Overview

There are two species of African elephant. The savanna (bush) elephant is the giant of open country across eastern and southern Africa; the smaller, darker forest elephant lives in the dense rainforest of Central and West Africa and is now Critically Endangered. This guide focuses on the savanna elephant, the one most people picture.

Elephants are keystone species: they knock down trees and keep grasslands open, dig water holes other animals use, and spread the seeds of dozens of plant species in their dung. Remove them and the habitat changes shape.

Physical characteristics

A big bull savanna elephant stands up to 4 m at the shoulder and weighs 6–7 tonnes. Both sexes grow tusks — enlarged upper incisors that keep growing for life and are used to dig, strip bark, move obstacles, and fight. The huge ears, laced with blood vessels, work as radiators: an elephant flaps them to shed heat, and each species’ ear shape roughly matches the outline of the continent or region it lives in.

The trunk is the elephant’s masterpiece — around 40,000 muscle units, no bone, and enough control to unshell a peanut or uproot a tree. The feet are built like natural shock absorbers, with a fatty pad that spreads the animal’s weight so it can move almost silently.

Diet and habitat

Elephants are bulk herbivores. They eat grass, leaves, bark, roots, and fruit — 150 kg or more a day — and need to drink daily, so they never stray far from water. That water dependence shapes their range and their famous long-distance movements between wet-season and dry-season feeding grounds.

Behaviour and society

Elephant society is built around female family units: a matriarch, usually the oldest cow, leads her daughters, sisters, and their calves. She holds the herd’s collective memory of where to find water and food and how to respond to threats. Adult males leave their birth herd in their teens and live alone or in loose bachelor groups, joining females only to breed.

Elephants communicate over kilometres using low-frequency rumbles felt through the ground as much as heard, and they show behaviour toward the bones and bodies of dead elephants — touching, inspecting, and returning to them — that has no clear parallel outside a handful of species.

Reproduction and life cycle

A cow is pregnant for about 22 months, longer than any other mammal, and gives birth to a single calf weighing around 120 kg. The whole herd helps raise it; older females and juveniles act as “allomothers.” Calves nurse for two to four years and stay closely bonded to their mothers and herd for life if they are female.

Bulls enter a periodic state called musth, marked by a surge in testosterone, aggression, and a strong secretion from glands on the head — during which they range widely and compete hard for mating opportunities.

Threats and conservation

The savanna elephant is listed as Endangered and still declining overall:

• Poaching for ivory. A wave of illegal killing through the 2000s and 2010s removed tens of thousands of elephants a year at its peak. Enforcement and demand-reduction have slowed it, but it has not stopped.
• Habitat loss and fragmentation. Farmland, fences, and roads are cutting the large connected landscapes elephants need into pieces.
• Human–elephant conflict. As habitat shrinks, elephants raid crops and are killed in retaliation.

Some southern African populations in well-managed parks are stable or growing to the point of local overcrowding, while populations in parts of Central and West Africa have all but vanished — the species’ status is really a patchwork of very different local stories.