What color are elephants? The normal color of the Elephant is greyish black. Grey and dark or you can say black and grey combination is the natural color of the elephants. There are also elephants whose color is the same as soil. But most of the elephants in the zoo’s and the forests are of greyish black color because of their nature.
Manure, gas, digestion, and diet
Elephants can be described as either manure manufacturers or eating machines, counting on their activity at the time.
Elephants are non-ruminant herbivores. They do not belch or ruminate, chew Chud as animals like deer, goats, cattle, and bison. Rather they generate gas- lots of gas and lots.
Elephants can feed up to sixteen hours a day. In the wild one, elephants can eat up as much as sixteen-hundred pounds of food in one day, despite two to three hundred pounds. In a zoo, a normal adult elephant eats ten to eighteen pounds and four to five bales of hay, or five to eight kg of grain in a day.
The daily water consumption is twenty to fifty gallons per animal or hundred to two-hundred liters.
Elephants consume their food with less than 50% efficiency. An elephant discharged from twelve to fifteen times a day, daily quantity for two hundred twenty to two hundred fifty pounds. This adds up to a yearly quantity of eighty-five thousand pounds manure, higher than forty tons, per adult elephant.
Amusing facts about the anatomy of elephants:
- Asian elephants have proportionally smaller ears and are a little smaller than their African. The skin is usually brown or dark grey, but they often have yellow and pink marks on their trunk, ears, and face.
- The African elephant has the biggest brain in the animal kingdom. It can weigh up to five kg! This is amusing when you think how much an elephant can weigh. African elephants weigh about up to six hundred kg and Asian elephants weigh about fifty-four hundred.
- The average life cycle is fifty to seventy years, but the oldest known elephant died at the age of eighty-six when he died.
- Elephants walk about four mph and they can swim long distances. Elephants are the only ones which can’t jump. Elephants run at speed of fifteen mph, but it is said that for a short distance they can run as fast as twenty-five mph.
- Adult elephants spend sixteen hours of their day in eating, they require up to one hundred and sixty liters of water and three-hundred kg of food every day.
- An elephant trunk is a very exciting multi-tool. Alongside being a big long nose used for trumpeting, smelling, and breathing. It is strong enough to remove branches of a tree and sensitive enough to pick up a blade of grass. Elephants can take up fourteen liters of water into their trunk and ■■■■ this water into their mouths to drink. They also use their trunks to spray themselves with mud and water during their bath. The amazing fact is that there are forty thousand muscles in an elephant.
- The big and sensitive thing is that in all of the mammals, female elephants are the only mammals that remain pregnant for two years. The baby of an elephant weighs around a hundred and twenty kg.
Facts about elephant social behavior and senses
- Elephants have poor eyesight and small eyes, but they cover for this with their magical sense of smell. They can smell water up to twelve miles away.
- Elephants can communicate with one another using scent, touch, and sound. They use a wide range of sounds to talk to each other because of their great sense of hearing.
- Elephants are caring and highly sensitive animals. They have been observed to express altruism, play, compassion, and grief. They show their respect to the ■■■■ by quietly and slowly touching the tusks and skulls with their feet and trunks.
- Through mirrors, elephants can identify themselves. Such identification shows a very high level of awareness and is something that only humans, magpies, cetaceans, and apes are known to do.
- As they are very sensitive creatures, they show their behavior pattern very much like post-traumatic stress depression.
- Male elephants leave the crowd between the age of fifteen to twelve and mostly live alone.
- Elephants have excellent memories and are extremely intelligent animals. Elephants are also able to distinguish and recognize people’s voices. They can tell the difference between female voices, male and human languages, those linked with danger, and female voices. Elephants are not afraid of mice unlike seen in movies. But yes, they are terrified of ants and bees.
Sleeping
Sleeping is essential for mammals. For humans, our bodies need to restore, synthesize hormones, and repair tissues. And this is the main reason we humans need to sleep an average of 7 to 9 hours a day.
Mammal animals require different amounts of sleep. Some animals sleep for three hours a day. Some animals like possum sleep up to eighteen hours a day.
Elephants also need less sleep a day.
Wild elephants need two hours of sleep while zoo animals need four to six hours of sleep in a day. Scientists believe wild elephants sleep less because they need to avoid dangers like lions and poachers. Plus they also need to eat a much amount of food. Zoo animals require more sleep than wild animals because Elephants in the zoo have no pressure like finding water and food. Also, they don’t need to terrify by animals like lions and leopards.
Elephants can sleep both lying up and standing
Elephants can sleep both lying and standing up. In the wild, elephants used to sleep standing up because it is effortless for them to move as elephants are so big, it takes much time to get up because of their bigger size.
Wild elephants favor sleeping in groups
To protect themselves from danger, elephants mostly used to sleep in groups. One group is awake and the other group of elephants sleeps. Awake elephants used to watch for dangers.
The valuable role of elephants in the natural environment
As well as having behavioral characteristics and fascinating anatomy, elephants also play a critical role in frail Asian and African ecosystems. Their bigger size means that they can shape the landscape they are in, as they feed and move around. They made a clearing in the wood areas, which let’s sunlight in so that smaller animals can survive and new plants can grow there.
Sadly to say, Elephant populations in both Asia and Africa are being endangered by negative interactions with humans.