Elephants are important for other animals within the environment too. They dig waterholes when river beds are dry that other animals can use as a water source, and their large footprints can create deep holes for water to collect in. The wide trails that they carve through the vegetation as they move through the landscape can also act as fire breakers and water run-offs, and make it easier for humans and other animals to access the forest and brush.
Sadly, elephant populations in both Africa and Asia are being threatened by negative interactions with humans. Despite being illegal, elephant poaching has been getting dramatically worse in parts of Africa in the last 10 years, mainly because of growing demand for ivory in China and the Far East.
It is thought that around 20, African elephants are killed every year for their ivory. Elephants rely on their tusks for survival. How do elephants use their tusks, you might ask? These desirable commodities are essential to the elephants for defense, offense, digging, feeding, lifting, gathering food and stripping back bark from trees — they cannot survive without them. The illegal wildlife trade also threatens to the Asian elephant population. As well as for ivory, elephants are also killed for their meat, skin and tail hair.
It is estimated that poaching for such products caused Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam to lose three quarters of their wild elephants in the late s and Habitat loss due to expanding human settlements is another challenge facing both African and Asian elephant populations.
Elephants need a lot of land to find enough food and water — they can roam across more than 30, sq km — but as human populations grow, the amount of land available to elephants reduces. Crop raiding by elephants is a particular problem in both Africa and Asia — this can result in a loss of income, food or even lives.
Farmers will sometimes kill elephants to protect their family or income, further threatening the size of elephant populations. Here at Oyster Worldwide, we run several elephant conservation and protection volunteer projects in both Asia and Africa , all of which seek to maintain and increase elephant populations in these areas.
You can get involved in important elephant research, monitoring, education and community projects in Namibia and South Africa , or choose from volunteering at an elephant sanctuary in Thailand , or on an elephant conservation project in Thailand , Sri Lanka or Laos. Follow the links above to the relevant pages on our website to find out more about each of these extremely worthwhile projects and learn how you can get up close to these magnificent creatures and experience their intelligence for yourself.
Your email address will not be published. We are a highly experienced gap and responsible travel organisation that has been sending volunteers and paid workers to diverse and exciting destinations around the world since Our project pages are packed full of information that you may require before booking a place with us. News Interesting facts about elephants. Their skin is normally dark grey or brown, but they often have pink or yellow marks on their face, ears and trunk.
The African elephant has the largest brain in the animal kingdom — it can weight up to 5kg! This is amazing when you consider how much does an elephant weigh Asian elephants weigh about kg, and African elephants up to kg! The human brain, however, is larger when measured as a proportion of our total body weight.
The average life span of an elephant is years, but the oldest known elephant in the world was 86 when he died. Elephants walk at about 4mph, and they are able to swim long distances. How fast can elephants run? Elephants have been clocked to run at 15 mph, however it is believed that, over a very short sharp distance, elephants could run as fast as 25mph. Adult elephants spend about 16 hours a day eating — they require up to kg of food and litres of water each day.
Elephants have 6 sets of molar teeth, upon which they depend for survival. To protect their young, adult elephants will douse them in sand and stand over the little ones as they sleep. Stories of African elephants getting drunk from the fermented fruit of the marula tree are not true, a study concluded.
Some farmers in Kenya protect their fields from elephants by lining the borders with beehives. Not only are their crops saved, but the farmers also get additional income from the honey.
Sarah Zielinski is an award-winning science writer and editor. She is a contributing writer in science for Smithsonian. The team then performed feeding tests with elephants to determine whether ants were responsible for the landscape patterns.
They offered branches, both with and without ants, from whistling thorn trees and branches from another tree that elephants normally ate. The elephants would eat either tree, but they were far less likely to eat branches with ants. Whereas giraffes can swipe ants away with their tongues, elephants are more vulnerable because their nostrils are located far from their mouths. By maintaining tree cover, ants influence large-scale ecosystem processes such as fires and carbon storage, the authors say.
And the chemicals emitted by these insects could help reduce human-elephant conflict. Since elephants seem to avoid the ants based on smell, spraying the chemicals on farmland could make crop-raiding elephants steer clear.
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