Elephant Facts

• Tembe elephants: weigh up to seven tons - the equivalent of 78 adult human males weighing an average of  90 kilograms each.

• Walking:  The average walking speed of an elephant is approximately 10Km/h (6mph)
• Charging: The maximum charging speed of an elephant is approximately 40Km/h (25mph)
• Heart and liver: The elephant heart weights 22kg and circulates about 450 litres of blood. Inner "cleaning" is performed by a 77kg liver.
• Water and trunk: To drink it's 9 litres of water at a time, the elephant uses its trunk which weighs 113kgs.
• Tongue: Helping the swallowing process is a 12kg elephant tongue.
• Food and intestines: The approximately 250kg food eaten every day passes through 18m of intestines. Eventually processed into about 100kg of elephant dung per day.
• Digestion: Elephants only digest about 40% of what they eat, and therefore, they need to spend two-thirds of every day eating.
• Urine:  An Adult bull produces approximately 50 litres of urine per day
• Calf weight:  A newly born calf weighs approximately 130Kg (285lbs)
• Gas: An elephant 'releases' 2000 litres of methane gas per day!
• Skin: Its skin weighs 450-750 kg.  The thickness of the skin varies from almost paper thin behind the ears, to approximately 2,5 cm on the back of the head.
• Tail: The tail weighs 11 kgs
• Fighting: The longest recorded fight between two elephants was recorded at 10 hours and 56 minutes.
• Bulls: Bull live alone or in bachelor herds which are in a constant state of flux
• Matriarch: Elephant herds consist of females and the young. A herd is led by a matriarch (grandmother). As young males reached maturity they are chased away by the herd. Bull elephants join the herd for mating.
• Gestation: An elephant's gestation (conception to birth) is 23 months.
• Sound:  Most of the communication between elephants occurs at an infrasound level.
• Call: It is estimated that an area of fifty square kilometres is filled with particular elephant "call" in infrasound. This might increase to about three hundred square kilometres (the size of Tembe) at dusk due to lower temperatures.
• Eyes: An elephant’s eyes are very small in relation to its head. The eye contains very few photoreceptors and they cannot see very well further than a few hundred feet.
• No jumping: Elephants cannot run or jump. They can however walk very fast and climb.
• Swimming:  They can swim considerable distances. In deep water they hold their trunks above the water like periscopes.
• Trunk: An elephant’s trunk is the most versatile of all mammalian creations being used as a nose, arm, hand and multipurpose tool. It is powerful enough to kill a lion with a single swipe, yet the finger-like lobes at the end are adept enough to pluck a feather from the ground.
• Trunk capacity:  An elephants trunk can hold approximately 17 litres of water
• Trunk muscles: The trunk is boneless, and is composed of an estimated 40 000 muscles.
• Tusks:  Elephant’s tusks are elongated upper incisor teeth, which grow continuously throughout the elephant’s life. They are not always an exact match, as this depends on which side they favour much like left and right-handed humans.
• Ears: An elephant’s ears are covered in veins, which form distinct and unique patterns which can be used to identify individuals - much like human fingerprints. An elephants ears are packed with blood vessels, and when flapped, they quickly lower the animal’s body temperature. This swiftly circulating blood is cooled by about 15 degrees Fahrenheit while in the elephant’s ear.
• Learning: Elephants are capable of passing on their learning from one generation to another
• Largest Elephant: The largest elephant recorded was a bull elephant in Angola that had an estimated mass of 10.9 tons and stood 4 meters at the shoulder