Elephants

Alex Re
Hello, welcome to On Wildlife. I'm your host, Alex Re. I hope you're all ready to dive into this week's episode. On this podcast we bring the wild to you will take you on a journey into the life of a different animal every week and I guarantee you you're going to come out of here knowing more about your favorite animal than you did before. I'm really excited to get into this week's animal. So, grab your passports because we're headed to two different continents, Africa and Asia, to talk about our worlds gentle giants, elephants.

The world has two different species of elephants, the African elephant and the Asian elephant. African elephants can live in two different types of habitats, the savanna, which is kind of a dry, arid environment, and also rain forests, which are really wet and filled with vegetation. Asian elephants are found mostly in the forests of India and certain parts of Southeast Asia. And you can actually identify which species is which by looking at their size, and also their ear shape. So African elephants are larger than Asian elephants. And they have larger ears, and their ears actually kind of look like Africa a little bit. Whereas Asian elephants have smaller, rounder ears. The word elephant comes from the Greek word elephants, which means ivory. And this is actually the stuff that makes up their tusks. And it's the reason why elephants are hunted by poachers. And we're going to get into that later on in the podcast.

Elephants are the largest land mammal on earth. And African elephants which are the larger of the two species can weigh up to seven tonnes that's around the weight of 14 vending machines. And they can get up to 10 feet tall and live up to 70 years old. Just because they're big doesn't mean they aren't fast. Elephants can run as fast as 40 miles per hour, that's 12 miles per hour more than the fastest person on earth. But don't worry, they're not going to try to eat you. Although they don't really like people coming into their territory. They're actually herbivores, meaning they only eat plants. And their diet really consists of grass leaves and brutes. They need to eat over 300 pounds of food per day because they're so big. That's like eating 600 Big Macs every single day. And they eat so much that they can spend up to three fourths of their day just eating. And the main tool that they use to eat with is their trunks and elephant trunks are just crazy. They have 40,000 muscles just in their trunks. Just think about this. Humans only have 600 muscles in their entire body. So needless to say their trunk is really powerful, and it can lift almost 800 pounds. And even though their trunks are really powerful, they're also really dexterous as well. They have these finger like structures at the end of their trunk to help them lift smaller objects. They can even lift stuff like pencils or paint brushes. Elephants need their trunks to work this way because they kind of use it like a hand. In order to eat. They strip the leaves off of a tree or they pick up grass from the ground. And then they put it in their mouth using their trunks. And their trunks aren't just used for picking stuff up. They can also store water. Elephant trunks can contain around 30 gallons of water. And what's really cool is that when they're swimming, they can use their trunk as a snorkel so that they can breathe underwater.

We're gonna take a quick break, so get ready for today's trivia question. What kind of scientists studies insects, A an entomologist, B a paleontologist, C an ornithologist or D a herpetologist? The answer is a an entomologist.

Alright, so we're back. And we're going to start talking about elephant moms. So elephants are mammals, just like humans. And that means that they have to go through a pregnancy and give birth to live young just like we do. So elephant moms have it pretty tough, because they have to go through a 22 month pregnancy. And what's really crazy is that their babies when they're born, can stand within the first 20 minutes of birth and walk within the first hour of birth. Can you imagine how creepy it would be to see a bunch of newborn babies walking around the hospital. Well, this is really important for the elephant's survival.They need to be able to keep up with their herd.

Elephant herds move around a lot because they're constantly looking for food and water. And elephant babies are able to keep up with their herd just two days after they've been born. Elephant herds are matriarchal, which means that a female actually controls the group. And adult males usually aren't even part of a herd, they usually like to go solo. Going back to when I was talking about how the herds have to keep traveling to find water, well, water can sometimes be scarce. So elephants can survive up to four days without water. And what's even crazier is that they can smell water up to three miles away. So now we're going to start talking about elephant communication. And elephants can make a variety of different sounds in order to communicate with each other. The most well known sound that an elephant makes is that huge loud trumpet sound. But there's actually a lot of other more subtle sounds that elephants make in order to communicate with each other. For example, they can produce this really, really low frequency rumble that sometimes humans can't even hear. And they're able to do this because their vocal cords are huge. They're eight times longer than the average human's vocal cords. And these sounds are great for traveling long distances, scientists think that they can be heard from up to two and a half kilometers away. But what's really interesting is that elephants don't only use their ears in order to detect sound. Some research has shown that they can detect sound frequencies and vibrations using their feet, they've been observed to lean forward putting more weight on their front two feet. And sometimes they'll even lift their front leg. And this is thought to be a way that they can detect vibrations. And the way that they're able to do this is by using a structure in their foot, called the digital cushion. And basically what the digital cushion is, is a large amount of fat inside of their foot. If you've ever looked at an elephant's foot, it's really wide and flat. That's because of the digital cushion. And this is what allows them to pick up on those sounds. The digital cushion has touch receptors inside of it called pacinian corpusc les. And these are the things that actually help pick up the vibrations. Humans also have pacinian corpuscles in our hands, and in the soles of our feet. Obviously, ours aren't as sensitive as the elephants, but they're still there to help us detect vibrations.

Now I want to start talking about elephants skin, they have really, really thick skin. And they're also called pachyderms, which literally translates to thick skin. So their skin is about 2.5 centimeters thick in most places. And just to compare two hours, in the place where our skin is the thickest, it's only four millimeters. That's a big difference. An elephant skin is a key part of their survival, and they like to keep their skin clean by taking regular dust and mud baths. This may seem counterproductive, but it actually helps them keep away bacteria that can be harmful. And the mud in the dust helps protect their skin from sunburn. And if you've ever noticed how elephant eyelashes are really really long, it's because it helps them keep the dirt out of their eyes when they're taking these mud baths. They can get pretty hot on the African savannah. But unfortunately, elephants don't have those many fans that squirt water on your face in order to cool them down. They have to use other ways of cooling, and most of them involve the use of their skin. Elephants actually have cracks in their skin. And these cracks can help them retain water, the cracks in the skin can retain up to 10 times more water than just flat skin. And this actually helps them cool down. Along with that the dust and the mud that elephants put on themselves gets into the cracks in the skin. And that helps them regulate their body temperature. When it gets hot, the cracks in their skin expand, which helps them release heat more easily. Elephants have also been known to cool down by flapping their ears.

Now I want to talk about what's between those two ears, which is their brain. So we've all heard the phrase an elephant never forgets. Well, there's actually scientific evidence that backs this up. Elephant temporal lobes are larger and denser than human temporal lobes. And the temporal lobe is an area of the brain that's associated with memory. So scientists think that they have a really good memory because of this. And one of the ways scientists know that they're really smart, is that they're able to recognize themselves in a mirror. Only a few other animals can do this. We're gonna take another short break. And when we come back, I'm going to talk about elephants, ancient relatives, woolly mammoths.

If you want more information about elephants or just want to suggest a new animal for me to talk about, you can email onwildlife.podcast@gmail.com You can also visit our website at www.onwildlife.org.

All right, so we're back and we're going to start talking about woolly mammoths. So if you don't know what a woolly mammoth looks like just imagine a larger elephant with a lot of fur all over its body. woolly mammoths went extinct over 10,000 years ago. And they were closely related to the modern elephants that we have today, scientists have a few ideas for why woolly mammoths became extinct. One reason was because of the changing climate. woolly mammoths were meant to live in cold, cold weather, and they lived during the Ice Age. Well, when it started to get warmer, they started to die out because they weren't suited for the warmer weather. Another reason is that they may have been over hunted by humans and other predators. And the last reason is kind of a combination between the two other reasons. So when the woolly mammoth population started getting smaller because of climate change, and over hunting, they may have gone through this thing called the genetic bottleneck. And basically what that means is that when an animal's population starts to get too small, there's not enough genetic variety between each individual. That's because they all have kind of the same genes. And this is when they start to develop genetic disorders, which eventually kills them off. This is actually happening in a lot of endangered species today. And it's really scary because there's not much that we can do about it, and it can cause them to go extinct. Anyways, back to woolly mammoths. So like I said before, woolly mammoths were basically like elephants in a fur coat. They lived in North America, Europe, and Asia during the ice age when it was extremely cold. And this actually helps us know more about them. Some of their corpses have been preserved extremely well because of how cold the weather is. And they were frozen in almost the same exact condition that they died. And because of this cold weather, some scientists even think that because mammoths are so well preserved that we can actually take their DNA and clone them, basically resurrecting an already extinct species. Haven't we learned enough from Jurassic Park?

Okay, so now I'm going to start talking about how important elephants are to the environment. Elephants are known as a keystone species. And that basically means that they are essential to the survival of their ecosystem. One of the things that they do during the dry season, when there's not a lot of water, is that they dig using their tusks, and this basically gives them access to water that's underground. Not only does this help them, but it also helps other animals that are struggling to find water during the dry season. And their massive footprints are places where water can collect giving more access to water. Not only do they help animals, but they can also help a variety of different plant species. When elephants walk through the forest, they can actually create trails that stop wildfires. And when elephants eat in the forest, they're actually making more room for new plants to grow. And elephants like to move a lot. So when they eat the seeds of a plant, they walk to a different location, poop it out, and that basically helps them spread the seeds of that plant throughout the forest. Now you see how important elephants are to their environment. They can help other plants and animals survive and even thrive, not to mention how cute they are. But their numbers are dwindling because of poachers. poachers will kill an elephant just so that they can cut off their tusks and sell them. And because of that, they're endangered. Around 90% of African elephants have been wiped out in the past century. And Asian elephants have declined around 50% in the last three generations. There's only about 400,000 elephants left on this earth. That may seem like a lot, but it's nothing compared to what their population was in the past. In 1900, there were about 12 million elephants. And poachers aren't the only reason that their numbers are declining. They're also losing their habitat because of deforestation and their water supply due to droughts that are caused by climate change. Luckily, there are a lot of organizations that are doing their part to help elephants right now. Some of the organizations you should check out our save the elephants, the African Wildlife Foundation, and the International elephant foundation.

Thank you so much for coming on this adventure with me as we explore the world of these gentle giants. You can find the sources that we used for this podcast and links to organizations that we reference at www.onwildlife.org. Next week, we're going to slow things down a bit so we can talk about our shelled friends snapping turtles, and that's On Wildlife.

Jess Avellino
You've been listening to On Wildlife with Alex Re brought to you every Wednesday.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai