Elephants have long been friends with humans and can help humans. Elephants are smart enough to carve out their own fields. They also bury their dead companions in fallen leaves and branches. Elephants have a very long lifespan, generally living to be around 70 years old.
Elephants are the largest land mammals in the world, although they are pitifully small compared to the world's largest mammal, the blue whale. An adult elephant weighs only 1/4 the weight of a blue whale's tongue. But on land, the elephant is definitely a giant.
Elephants have long trunks, large ears and tusks.
1. Big ears
Elephants have two large ears. The biggest function of elephant ears is to dissipate heat. The function of heat dissipation is even higher than that of hearing.
2. Ivory
Elephants have a pair of well-developed incisors on their upper jaws that grow throughout their lives. The incisors of African elephants can be as long as 3.3 meters, and the tusks of female Asian elephants are not exposed.
Ivory is a tool for male elephants to show off. The longer the tusk, the more attractive the female elephant is. It is also strong against other male elephants. The trunk is easily injured, so elephants generally fight with their tusks.
3. Long nose
The most conspicuous thing on an elephant is its huge trunk, which is also one of its most important organs. The trunk of an elephant is like a water pipe, the long one can hang down to the ground, it is cylindrical and can be stretched freely.
The torso of elephants is usually curly and the tip of the nose has finger-like protrusions that allow it to pick up small objects.
Elephants are social animals, with the family as the unit and headed by the female elephant. The time of daily activities, action routes, foraging places, habitats, etc. are all under the command of the female elephant.
Adult male elephants are solely responsible for keeping the family safe. Sometimes several groups of elephants come together to form large herds of hundreds of elephants.
Elephants generally eat vegetables, fruits, leaves and other food, mainly wild fruits, weeds, tender bamboo and other plants. An adult elephant drinks hundreds of liters of water and eats hundreds of kilograms of grass every day.
According to the needs of the elephant's body, it will eat some bark and chew the trunk. Elephants sometimes use animal nutrition to meet their own developmental needs, for example during pregnancy when females eat other animals.
It is estimated that a female elephant takes an average of 22 months from fertilization to giving birth, more than double the 10-month pregnancy rate in humans. After 22 months, the mother elephant will give birth to a baby elephant of at least 100 kilograms!
Regardless of how long an elephant is pregnant, baby elephants are far more vulnerable than other mammals in nature after birth.
It is not until five or six days later that the baby elephant has the ability to walk freely, so during this time, the mother elephant must always protect the baby elephant to prevent the baby elephant from being hurt by predators.
In order to adapt to the surrounding environment, baby elephants have to learn many life skills from their mothers. For example, they have to learn how to grab food with their nose. Newborn elephants do not have the ability to flexibly use their trunks and need to be familiar with the functions of their trunks under the guidance of their mothers.
