ELEPHANTS

Quick Physical Statistics

	Elephants typically reach at thirteen or fourteen years of age
	They breed / have offering up until they are around fifty years old
	They may live seventy years or possibly more
	A cow produces a single calf and in very rare cases twins
	The interval between births is between two and a half to four years.
	An elephants trunk, a union of the nose and upper lip, is a highly sensitive organ with over 100,000 muscle units.

Interesting Facts

	Elephant trunks can get very heavy. It is not uncommon to see elephants resting them over a tusk!
	Elephants cry, play, have incredible memories, and laugh.lElephants are sensitive to fellow animals where 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 lo the group.
	Elephants grieve at a loss of a stillborn baby, a family member, and in many cases other elephants.
	Elephants dont drink with their trunks, but use them as "tools" to drink with. This is accomplished by filling the trunk with water and then using it as a hose to pour it into the elephant's mouth.
	Interestingly, the Asian elephant is more closely related to the extinct mammoth than to the African elephant.

An Introduction to Elephant Impact - A Super Keystone Species It seems inevitable that as long as we humans impose our own theories on how to best govern nature, there will be a difference of opinion of "animal" management. Over the course of evolution, the elephant as we know it today has evolved into a strong forced bulldozer that has the power to modify the landscape it resides in. For elephants their effect on the landscape is often considered destruction, but is it? The answer to this question partially depends on your premnceiued uiews of "nature". If you see nature as something static and in a particular way then any change no matter how minute will amount to destruction. An interesting statistic found in the book African Elephants: A Celebration of Majesty about this issue; a general estimation shows that Man is clearing more forests in one day that all the elephants in Africa will 'destroy' within one year. Put in perspective, the effect that elephants have on their environment may not be as serious are we have been led to believe.
Unfortunately for some, our narrow opinion of seeing elephants as only living bulldozers of destruction is far from the case. As much as 8O percent of what elephants consume is retimed to the soil as barely digested highly fertile manure. The Ecological Impact of the Elephant is Priceless!

	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 rain fall. Elephants act as seed dispersers by their fecal matter. It is often carried below ground by dung booties and termites causing the soil to become more aerated and further distributing the nutrients.
	Their 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.

In the tradition of elephant sites, we have provided a breakdown of elephants into two categories for basic physical statistics. Keep in mind that the two "groups" are quite different genetically. Homeless Elephants Find Refuge in Sri Lanka They say an elephant never forgets, but what happens when an elephant is forgotten? In Sri Lanka, abandoned elephants who cannot sirvive in the wild find refuge at the Elephant Farm at Pinnewela (near Ram bukkana). People feed, groom and care for 46 elephants on the farm. The babies drink milk warmed to body temperature from super-size bottles, seven per feeding. Maybe at first they can't find their own food. So we bring it to them here," said ldris Sal ley, a caretaker at the elephant farm.
Outcasts like Raja, an old blind elephant who was wounded by hunters,live on the farm, as does an elephant rumored to have killed more than a dozen people. The farm supports itself in part through tourists, who come for a rare close-up view of the animals. The orphans arrive from across the country, rescued from remote villages where they have lost their mothers to quarry accidents, shootings or lynch mobs.At the Elephant Orphanage, deep in the tropical hill country of central Sri Lanka, the motherless calves are raised by human foster parents who ply them with bottied milk five times a day and give them an occasional swig of beer in an effort to help preserve Asia's dwindling wild-elephant population.
"Without the orphanage, most of them would be left to die or be killed," said Wijepala Ranbanda, curator of the elephant orphanage.

In Sri Lanka and throughout Asia, some of the world's larger remaining wild-elephant herds -about 5 0,000 animals across the continent -face threats to their survival from human populations that are bulldozing forests into farmland and severing centuries-old migration routes with highways and urban development.
In recent months the competition for space between man and beast has led to unprecedented clashes as the giant pachyderms, squeezed out of their native habitat, have attacked villagers, raided farm crops.

in Sri Lanka, a small Island nation that is home to an estimated 3,000 wild elephants, the problem of diminishing habitat is even more acute. The island has been stripped of 50 per cent of its forest land in the last three decades, dramatically affecting the elephant herds.

"They want to roam, and they overlap with the people," said curator Ranbanda of the Elephant orphanage, which was created In 1975 by government officials worried about habitat encroachment.

In the last 19 years, the number of deserted, maimed and impaired elephants that are provided foster care has jumped from about 10 a year to 56 last year. Some of the orphans raised in the sanctuary of palm groves and rolling grassland are now rearing their own babies at the orphanage.

The sheer size of the elephants makes them far more susceptible to the problems of human encroachment than tigers, rhinoceroses and other endangered animals that tend to live in small pockets, wildlife officials said.

The orphanage's newest arrival weighed 60 kilograms (132 pounds) when she was born nearly two months ago. She will drink about 25 litres of milk a day until she's weaned after 4 1/2 years.