Savannah Elephant
- Savannah Elephant Photo
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African savannah elephants communicate across great
distances at low frequencies that cannot be heard by humans.
- Julie Larsen Maher ©WCS
The African savannah elephant is the largest land mammal in the world. A mature bull elephant may stand up to 13 feet tall at the shoulder and weigh 14,000 pounds. The most noticeable distinction between African savannah and forest elephants is size: The savannah is larger and has bigger and more curved tusks. Asian elephants have much smaller ears than both African species and usually, only the male Asian elephant sports tusks. African savannah elephants have large home ranges, spanning hundreds of square miles. As they move, they push over trees to get to their branches and roots, helping maintain the grasslands, and they use their tusks and trunks to dig for water, creating pools that many other animals need to survive. These elephants are important dispersers of seeds through their consumption of fruit.
In folklore, elephants are known for not forgetting. For the African savannah elephant, memory is a tool for surviving challenges that may come intermittently over decades. Long-term memory tends to be vested in the older females, called matriarchs, without which the herd could die of starvation or dehydration. During the drought of 1993 in Tanzania, elephant matriarchs that remembered a similar drought 35 years before led their herds beyond the borders of Tarangire National Park in search of food and water. Groups with matriarchs that were not old enough to remember the previous drought suffered a 63 percent mortality of their calves that year. Unfortunately, these large females are the most attractive targets for ivory poachers. The animals tend to have the largest tusks, and they may be easier to find than the males.
Fast Facts
| Scientific Name | Loxodonta africana |
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Elephants have complex social behavior. When a member
of the herd dies, they cover the body with grass and dirt and stay near the site
for several hours.
African savannah elephants communicate across great
distances at low frequencies that cannot be heard by humans. An elephant herd consists of related females and their
young and is managed by the eldest female. Adult male elephants rarely
join a herd and lead a solitary life, only approaching herds during mating
season. African savannah elephants may live up to 70 years in
the wild, longer than any other mammals except humans. An elephant’s trunk has more than
40,000 muscles and tendons. The trunk can lift large objects, yet its
sensitive tip can manipulate very small things.
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Challenges
Habitat loss and poaching are the biggest concerns for the survival of elephants. As the human footprint has grown in Africa, elephant habitats have been converted to farmland, deforested by industrial logging and mining, and otherwise developed by roads and settlements. Poachers kill elephants for their ivory and meat, and farmers sometimes kill them to protect their crops, which elephants often raid. The IUCN lists African savannah elephant populations as Vulnerable.
WCS Responds
WCS works throughout much of the elephant's remaining habitat to
monitor and manage populations and find novel approaches to reduce human-elephant
conflict. One way to decrease elephant raids on human crops is to help farmers
devise methods of keeping elephants away. Such examples include using chili
pepper smoke or chili pepper spray blasted from guns, which serves as a noxious
airborne deterrent. WCS supports the Elephant Pepper Development Trust, a
program that sells hot sauce grown from alternative pepper crops to aid
local farmers and elephant protection efforts.
WCS has been supporting elephant studies in Tanzania’s
Tarangire
National Park—one of the best parks in Africa to see large herds of calm
elephants. Our main goals there are to protect migration routes and dispersal areas beyond the park's relatively safe boundaries and to work with local Maasai and tourism operators to accomplish this.
Working with local governments to curtail poaching, WCS undertook a fundraising effort to support game wardens in
Virunga National Park in the
Democratic Republic of Congo. The wardens suffered attacks by
armed militias who were poaching elephants in the park. WCS also sounded the alarm when
poachers with automatic rifles killed 2,000 savannah elephants in Chad’s Zakouma
National Park. WCS subsequently established a fund to help save the park’s
surviving elephants, numbering fewer than 1,000. A WCS pilot and light aircraft
that are based in Zakouma continually provide information to Chad’s park service about
poaching activities and elephant herd locations.
From the Newsroom
In the battle against the illegal ivory trade that is decimating elephants, conservation groups are turning to technological solutions to better assist local security forces. WCS's Emma Stokes describes one: the free, open-source Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool, or SMART—an innovative software application recently designed to help rangers curb wildlife trade.
Penny Kalk began working with elephants at WCS’s Bronx Zoo in 1976, looking after the youngest members of the herd. Today, she continues to oversee their care as Collections Manager for the Mammal Department. With her intimate understanding of individual animals, Kalk recently traveled to Laikipia, Kenya, to aid field colleagues studying elephant demographics and movement patterns.
The Republic of Congo sends a Chinese ivory smuggler to jail, an example of the tough
law enforcement that WCS recommends for combating the illegal wildlife trade.
NPR reporter Frank Langfitt visits WCS’s Paul Elkan and Mike Kock on a mission to locate and radio-collar a group of elephants on the savannahs of South Sudan. The expedition is part of WCS’s work to protect the emerging nation’s remarkable wildlife from poachers and development.
Elephants that share their turf with poachers may face life-threatening injuries when they encounter a rusty manacle buried in the foliage.
The government of Tanzania plans to build a highway through Serengeti National Park, potentially disrupting one of the
world’s biggest migrations of large mammals and jeopardizing a popular tourism destination. WCS and partners urge the country's officials to consider alternate routes.
A WCS study suggests that the experience of matriarchs may help
herds survive in the age of climate change, when animals may have to contend with increasing drought
During an aerial survey to assess levels of poaching in Chad’s wet season, WCS conservationist Mike Fay found that elephants who went in search of forage outside Zakouma National Park paid the exit fee with their lives.