Elephant Trivia
Did you know this about Elephants...?

  • Elephants stomp when they walk.

  • Elephants sleep standing up.

  • Sometimes baby elephants (calves) lie down to sleep.

  • Elephants bathe. Sometimes they spray dirt on themselves to get the parasites off. Sometimes they bathe in mud.

  • Elephants live in herds.

  • Elephants cool off by fanning their ears. This cools the blood in their ears. The blood then goes to the rest of their body and cools off the elephant.

  • Elephants poop 80 pounds in one day.

  • Elephants weigh 10,000 pounds. It would take 250 humans to add up to 10,000 pound.

  • Elephants collect food with their trunks.

  • Only grown up female elephants and their babies live in the herds.

  • The male elephants leave the herd when they are 12 years old.

  • Elephants fight with their tusks.

  • Elephants eat grass and bark.

  • During the wet season Elephants eat things low to the ground.

  • During the dry season Elephants use their trunk to gather food from trees and bushes.

  • Elephants suck up water into their trunks and shoot it into their mouths.

  • Elephants need lots of room to roam and eat.

  • Elephants can run 25 miles per hour for short distances.

  • Elephant trunks can get very heavy. It is not uncommon to see elephants resting them over a tusk.

  • Elephants cry, play and laugh and have incredible memories.

  • Elephants are sensitive fellow animals whereby if a baby complains, the entire family will rumble and go over to touch and caress it.

  • Elephants have greeting ceremonies when a friend that has been away for some time returns to the group.

  • Elephants grieve at a loss of a stillborn baby, a family member and in many cases other elephants.

  • Interestingly, the Asian elephant is more closely related to the extinct mammoth than to the African elephant.

  • Elephants provide a vital role in the ecosystem they inhabit. They modify their habitat by converting savannah and woodlands to grasslands.

  • Elephants can provide water for other species by digging water holes in dry riverbeds the depressions created by their footprints and their bodies trap rainfall.

  • Elephants act as seed disperses by their faecal matter. It is often carried below ground by dung beetles and termites causing the soil to become more nutritious.

  • Elephants paths act as firebreaks and rain water conduits. An Elephants journey through the high grass provides food for birds by disturbing small reptiles, amphibians or insects.

  • Elephants perform greeting ceremonies when a member of the group returns after a long time away. The welcoming animals spin around, flap their ears, and trumpet.

  • The blue whale weighs as much as thirty elephants and is as long as three greyhound buses.

  • The hippopotamus is, next to the elephant, the heaviest of all land mammals. It may weigh as much as 8,000 pounds. It is also a close relative of the pig.

  • Mice, whales, elephants, giraffes and humans all have seven neck vertebra.

  • Pink Elephants? In regions of India where the soil is red, elephants take on a permanent pink tinge because they regularly spray dust over their bodies to protect themselves against insects.

  • African elephants have larger bodies, bigger ears, less bumpy foreheads and longer tusks than Asian elephants.

  • At birth an Asian elephant weighs around 440 pounds (200 kilograms) and an African elephant weighs 581 pounds (264 kilograms). By adulthood both types of elephants will weigh close to 4 tons

  • Elephants communicate in sound waves below the frequency that humans cannot hear.

  • Elephants have been known to remain standing after they die.

  • According to the Guinness Book of Records, the biggest elephant ever recorded was a male African elephant from Angola that weighed 24,000 pounds.


 
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