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1. Elephants are the National animal of Thailand
2. Elephant nose has over 40,000 muscles
3. Elephants can consume about 15 quarts of water at a time

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Elephants do not just communicate acoustically. They also communicate through the vibrations in the ground. Different vibrations could be caused by another herd of elephants or even a storm. Whatever they feel in the ground can let them know if it is safe to move forward or to leave the area.

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Elephants are not the only ones who use seismic communication. The website below shows other animals that use it also.

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Ideas and Insight From National Geographic

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Adapted from Catlin O'Connell's novel, Ivory Ghosts is a thriller brimming with majestic wildlife, village politics, and international intrigue, a chilling quadruple homicide raises the stakes in the battle to save Africa's elephants. Adapted by Caitlin O'Connell, Art by Debora Carita and Liezl Buenaventura. Read more and find out where to purchase a copy.

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Elephants, the largest land animals on the planet, are among the most exuberantly expressive of creatures. Joy, anger, grief, compassion, love; the finest emotions reside within these hulking masses. Through years of research, scientists have found that elephants are capable of complex thought and deep feeling. In fact, the emotional attachment elephants form toward family members may rival our own.
Joy
In the wild, joy is an emotion that elephants have no shame in showing. They express their happiness and joy when they are amongst their loved ones-family and friends. Playing games and greeting friends or family members all elicit displays of joy.

But the one event that stirs a level of elephant happiness beyond compare is the birth of a baby elephant. In Echo: An Elephant to Remember, the birth of Ebony is one such occasion. The excitement of several of the females in Echo's family can't be contained as they are heard bellowing and blaring during the birth of the new baby.

Another highly emotional occasion in an elephant's life is an elephant reunion. This joyful meeting between related, but separated, elephants is one of exuberance and drama. The greeting ceremony marks the incredible welcoming of a formerly absent family member. During the extraordinary event, the elephants about to be united begin calling each other from a quarter a mile away. As they get closer, their pace quickens. Their excitement visibly flows as fluid from their temporal glands streams down the sides of their faces. Eventually, the elephants make a run towards each other, screaming and trumpeting the whole time. When they finally make contact, they form a loud, rumbling mass of flapping ears, clicked tusks and entwined trunks. The two leaning on each other, rubbing each other, spinning around, even defecating, and urinating (for this is what elephants do when they are experiencing sheer delight). With heads held high, the reunited pair fill the air with a symphony of trumpets, rumbles, screams, and roars. Bliss.
Love
There is no greater love in elephant society than the maternal kind. Nobody who observes a mother with her calf could doubt this. It is one of the most touching aspects of elephant social customs. The calf is so small compared to the adult that it walks under its mother, who, incredibly, does not step on it or trip over it. Mother and child remain in constant touch. If a calf strays too far from its mother, she will fetch it. The mother often touches her child with trunk and legs, helping it to its feet with one foot and her trunk. She carries it over obstacles and hauls it out of pits or ravines. She pushes it under her to protect it from predators or hot sun. She bathes it, using her trunk to spray water over it and then to scrub it gently. The mother steers her calf by grasping its tail with her trunk, and the calf follows, holding its mother's tail. When the calf squeals in distress, its mother and others rush to its protection immediately. It is easy to see why the bond between mother and daughter lasts 50 years or more.
Grief
One of the most moving displays of elephant emotion is the grieving process. Elephants remember and mourn loved ones, even many years after their death. When an elephant walks past a place that a loved one died he or she will stop and take a silent pause that can last several minutes. While standing over the remains, the elephant may touch the bones of the dead elephant (not the bones of any other species), smelling them, turning them over and caressing the bones with their trunk. Researchers don't quite understand the reason for this behavior. They guess the elephants could be grieving. Or they could they be reliving memories. Or perhaps the elephant is trying to recognize the deceased. Whatever the reason, researchers suspect that the sheer interest in the dead elephant is evidence that elephants have a concept of death.

Researchers have described mother elephants who appear to go through a period of despondency after the death of a calf, dragging behind the herd for days. They've also witnessed an elephant herd circling a dead companion disconsolately. After some time, and likely when they realized the elephant was dead, the family members broke off branches, tore grass clumps and dropped these on the carcass. Another researcher noted a family of African elephants surrounding a dying matriarch. The family stood around her and tried to get her up with their tusks and put food in her mouth. When the rest of the herd finally moved on, one female and one calf stayed with her, touching her with their feet.
Rage and Stress
Terror, rage and stress, unfortunately, are also commonplace in the elephant repertoire of emotions. Terror afflicts baby African elephants who wake up screaming in the middle of the night after they have witnessed their families murdered and poached - a type of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Some researchers suggest a species-wide trauma is taking place in wild elephant populations. They say that elephants are suffering from a form of chronic stress after sustaining decades of killings and habitat loss. The recent surge in cases of wild elephant rage reported by the media is a sad indicator of the kind of stress that wild elephants are undergoing. Nearly 300 persons are killed every year by wild elephants in India. But the increasing numbers of deaths are closely correlated to the ever-increasing human presence in traditional wild elephant habitats, as well as the the effects of climate change, and loss of territory and resources. The ongoing competition between elephants and humans for available land and resources is leading to ever more unfortunate and often deadly consequences.

Human activity does more than put a stress on elephants to find resources. It can often disrupt the complex and delicate web of familial and societal relations that are so important in elephant society. Calves are carefully protected and guarded by members of the matriarchal elephant family. Any perception of danger triggers a violent reaction from the matriarch and, subsequently, the entire family. The extremes a family will go to protect a vulnerable new calf are reported in the news stories as fits of unprovoked "elephant rage." Charging a village, storming into huts where harvested crop is stored, plundering fields and, if disturbed, turning violent are some of the instances reported by the media.
Compassion and Altruism
Compassion is not reserved for offspring alone in elephant society. Elephants appear to make allowances for other members of their herd. Observers noted that one African herd always traveled slowly because one of its members had never recovered from a broken leg. And in another case, a park warden reported a herd that traveled slowly because one female was carrying around a dead calf. One perplexing report was of an adult elephant making repeated attempt to help a baby rhinoceros stuck in the mud. She continued to try to save the baby rhino despite the fact that its mother charged her each time. Risking her life for the sake of an animal that is not her own, not related to her, or even her own species is remarkably altruistic in nature.

While there is a great deal more to learn about what elephants feel, such accounts are astonishing. They reveal a creature that weeps, revels, rages and grieves. They lead us to believe that the depth of elephant emotional capacity knows no limit. They are striking for they suggest that elephants act on feelings and not solely for survival.

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Echo: An Elephant to Remember | Elephant Emotions | Nature | PBS

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Elephants, the largest land animals on the planet, are among the most exuberantly expressive of creatures. Joy, anger, grief, compassion, love; the finest emotions reside within these hulking masses. Through years of research, scientists have found that elephants are capable of complex thought and deep feeling.

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Our world is changing and this website shows the effects on out elephants.

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For centuries, elephants have suffered mass murder at the hands of ivory traders. This has been the main threat faced by these impressive beasts. However, as the world continues to "develop" and expand, a shortage of space is rapidly becoming the top concern for wildlife.

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A group of elephants is called a herd. The herd is lead by the oldest and sometimes largest female in the group. Males leave the herd around 12-15 years old to either live in solitude or live with a group of males.

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Talk about women empowerment, Elephants are all about matriarchy

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IFAW - International Fund for Animal Welfare

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Whenever I'm asked about elephants and the work I do, I invariably end up talking about matriarchs, as they form both the core of elephant society and the core of this study. Why are matriarchs so important to that society?

A matriarch is a leader of an elephant family, and is usually the oldest female in that family. My particular interest within the Amboseli Elephant Research Project (AERP) focuses on what is happening to families who lost their matriarchs in the devastating 2008/2009 drought.

Elephant families revolve around females. Males leave at puberty and become socially independent, but females remain within their families for their whole lives. They rear their calves alongside their mothers, grandmothers, sisters and aunts. Elephant families are extremely fluid in their association patterns meaning that not all members are together all of the time. This wonderful flexibility and fluidity in elephant society, which we call "fission-fusion", is one of the things that I find so fascinating about elephants.

When food is scarce, elephants will spend more time with just one or two other family members and their calves, rather than with the whole family together, although they remain co-ordinated, to a degree, by using vocalisations.

When they're together, family members take their cues from the matriarch - as the leader, her decisions influence when the family eats and where, when they spend time with other elephants, and when to leave the large groups of animals that form around feeding and drinking sites.

If family members want to do something different from the matriarch, they will have to leave the family for a while and catch up later. Since old females have a lot of experience in getting the most from the environment, it usually profits the rest of the members to follow her lead. And they usually do. Good matriarchs need to balance the needs of family members so that they can stay together, and the amount of time that a family spends together is affected by the degree of conflict in individual needs. For example, the mothers of young calves need to drink more frequently in order to maintain their milk production.

It's easy to see there are both costs and benefits to staying within a family; the costs include having to "put up" with what everyone else wants to do, when their interests might conflict with your own.

Of course there are benefits too - not only in gaining the experience from a matriarch who remembers when to visit a particular area to feed, but also her experience in dealing with special or threatening events.

Females support their daughters the first time they come into oestrus and are ready to be mated, when they give birth, and in caring for young calves (which have a remarkable propensity to get stuck in mud, or lost in bushes).

Matriarchs lead their families away from dangers such as predators, and older matriarchs are better at responding appropriately to threats, as shown by a series of elegant "playback" experiments by Amboseli collaborators Karen McComb and Graeme Shannon, these recently attracted a lot of media attention.

Matriarchs thus shape the daily lives of family members, and by doing so affect their general health and body condition, and therefore influence their survival and their reproductive success.

Analyses of the long-term data gathered by the AERP since 1972 have shown that when families have older matriarchs, every female in that family reproduces at a faster rate. This makes families larger, and even more successful, as pre-reproductive females in the family provide calf-sitting care known as "allomothering" which increases calf survival. This allows mothers to concentrate more on foraging, and thereby boosts their milk production.

So families flourish with old, experienced leaders at the helm, and their loss is severely felt by family members. The death of a matriarch is inevitably followed by a period of confusion amongst the family; as the matriarch is the oldest member of the family, the surviving members will have known her for their entire lives. Losing the "rallying point" inevitably alters their daily activity patterns, and sometimes their ranging patterns (i.e. the areas they use).

It takes time for a new leader to emerge, and if the eldest females are particularly close in age, they may split and form two (or more) new families. Part of my study examines this process, and whether families that lost multiple females over the drought period suffer more from these losses than other families.

In previous blogs, I've written about learning to identify the Amboseli elephant families and the individuals in those families. By spending time watching elephants, you learn their physical "marks" or characteristics that allow you identify individuals, but you also learn the particular character traits of the individuals. Some females are strong confident leaders, whilst others are more nervous and prone to be vigilant. Some are very maternal and patient, for example waiting for everyone to be ready before moving off from a resting spot, whilst others are much less so.

The matriarchs leading my study families have their own characters and personality traits, and that influences the overall family characteristics: Alison, the leader of the AAs is not a very strong leader, and often the family is split three ways with each of the oldest females - Alison, Agatha and Amelia - leading their daughters and calves. The AAs are quite a large family, with 23 members, which may partly explain why they're not very cohesive. Even when together, they often travel in "sub-groups" so that they're in the same area, but not travelling in one cohesive group.

In comparison, the JAs are a small family with just 10 members, and their matriarch Jolene keeps everyone together much of the time. Olympia is the matriarch of the OAs and, I have to confess, already a favourite of mine. Born in 1980, she's just a year older than I am, for a start, and she has beautiful tusks - they curve gracefully upwards and are very symmetrical. The OAs are also interesting because when their matriarch Orlanda died during the 2009 drought, an older female Orabel split and formed her own family. At 43, Orabel is significantly older than Olympia, and the dynamic between the two females and their respective families is interesting. Olympia is Orlanda's daughter, and I wonder whether being a matriarch's daughter might somehow help Olympia make up for her relative lack of age and experience. Or she may choose to spend time Orabel, and gain experience that way. That's just another question where we have to wait and see what happens next...

--VF

For more information on the work of the Amboseli Trust for Elephants in Kenya, visit https://elephanttrust.org

For more pictures of the families, click here.

For more information on the International Fund for Animal Welfare effort to save animals including elephants around the world, visit https://www.ifaw.org

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Why Matriarchs Matter in Elephant Society

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Whenever I'm asked about elephants and the work I do, I invariably end up talking about matriarchs, as they form both the core of elephant society and the core of this study. Why are matriarchs so important to that society? A matriarch is a leader of an elephant family, and is usually the oldest female in that family.

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Elephants are known to have a great memory. Click the video below to find out how!

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Why elephants never forget - Alex Gendler

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As the human population grows, the elephant's lose their habitat. We are taking more land for ourselves and leaving less land for them to roam and live their life.