African bush elephant

• 1. Introduction

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  The African bush elephant, Loxodonta africana, is the largest living animal on land, and one bull shot in Angola in 1974 shows how large it can become. That animal stood 3.96 metres at the shoulder. Its weight was estimated at 10.4 tonnes. It remains the largest well-measured bull on record.

  How does a creature of that scale keep cool under an African sun, and what does it take to feed it? What holds an elephant society together when the males leave? Why did the species slip onto the Endangered list in 2021, even as some herds grow? And what did people carve and paint of these animals long before anyone counted them?

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• 2. Bodies and Appetites

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  A fully grown bull under good conditions stands about 3.20 metres at the shoulder and weighs about 6.0 tonnes on average. A mature cow is smaller, at about 2.60 metres and 3.0 tonnes. Growth ends when the long bones finish fusing. That happens around age 40 in males and around 25 in females.

  The ears can reach 2 metres by 1.5 metres and cover the whole shoulder. They work as radiators. Flapping stirs the air, and large blood vessels on the inner surface give off heat. The grey, sparsely haired skin helps too. Its bending cracks hold water, and the evaporation cools the animal whatever the air temperature.

  An adult eats up to 150 kilograms of food a day and drinks about 230 litres of water. The diet runs anywhere from almost pure grazing to nearly pure browsing, depending on habitat and season. Uprooting trees can turn woodland into grassland. Fruit-eating also makes the elephant a seed disperser.

  Salt is a craving. In the Kalahari, elephants visit licks rich in water-soluble sodium. They also gather at termite mounds. Around Kruger National Park and the shore of Lake Kariba, they have been seen swallowing wood ash for the same mineral.

  Teeth set the clock on an elephant's life. Each jaw quadrant grows six molars in turn. The first, only 4 centimetres long, is gone by about 2.5 years. The last reaches 31 centimetres in length and is well worn by age 65.

  Tusks are enlarged upper incisors, and both sexes carry them. They erupt between the ages of one and three years, pushing out from baby tusks called tushes that reach 5 centimetres. A thin cap of enamel wears off by around age five. Tusks then keep growing for life.

  By age 60, a bull's tusks average 109 kilograms, against 17.7 kilograms for a cow's. A fracture can expose the pulp and bring serious infection. The longest tusk ever recorded for the species measured 3.51 metres and weighed 117 kilograms.

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• 3. Matriarchs and Rumbles

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  For 4.5 years, Iain Douglas-Hamilton watched elephants in Lake Manyara National Park. He coined the term kinship group for two or more family units with close ties. The family unit itself is the core of elephant society. It holds several adult cows, their daughters, and their young sons, under the lead of a matriarch.

  The herd shares the work. Members find food and water together, defend one another, and help raise offspring, a practice called allomothering. Size shifts with the seasons. Aerial surveys in the late 1960s and early 1970s counted an average of 6.3 elephants per group in Uganda's Rwenzori National Park. In Chambura Game Reserve the average was 28.8. At both sites, groups swelled in the wet season.

  Somewhere between the ages of 10 and 19, young bulls drift away from the family. Some roam alone. Others form all-male groups.

  The trunk carries much of the conversation. A lower-ranking elephant greets a superior by placing the tip of its trunk in the superior's mouth. Mothers calm calves with touches and embraces, and discipline them with slaps. Courting pairs intertwine their trunks, and rivals wrestle with them.

  The voice has a wide range. Most rumbles fall below what human ears can hear, yet they carry far, drawing mates and warning off rivals. A growl you can hear is a greeting. A bellow signals pain or fear, and a roar backs up a threat. Trumpeting means excitement, distress or aggression. Juveniles squeal in distress, and adults scream to intimidate.

  The brain behind all this has a large, complex neocortex, a trait shared with humans, apes and some dolphins. A study in 2013 suggested that elephants may understand pointing.

  In 2020, another study stressed how much herds depend on old bulls for navigation and survival. Its authors worried that both legal trophy hunting and illegal poaching are removing them.

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• 4. Musth and the Rhino Killings

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  By the age of 24, a bull may enter musth, a period of high testosterone and sharp aggression. A gland on each side of the head swells and leaks fluid down the cheeks. The bull also dribbles urine, first in drops and later in a steady stream. The researchers Joyce Poole and Cynthia Moss named one result of long urination the green penis syndrome, for the colour it leaves.

  Young bulls up to 35 have short, irregular spells lasting days to weeks. Older bulls stay in musth for two to five months each year. The season follows the rains, when cows are in oestrus. Bulls in musth cover long distances, call to cows at very low frequencies, and leave strong-smelling urine trails. Cows seek these bulls out and follow the trails. A bull in musth wins more mating chances than one that is not.

  In the 1990s, South Africa saw what happens when older bulls are missing. Young bulls killed 63 rhinoceroses, mostly endangered or rare, in Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Park and Pilanesberg National Park. The killers were orphans aged 17 to 25, from families that had been culled. They had been spared because of their size, and they grew up with no herd and no dominant bulls. They entered musth too early, and older cows rejected them.

  First, three young bulls suspected of the killings were shot. The ecologist and gamekeeper Gus Van Dyk then proposed a better fix. Six adult bulls were brought into Pilanesberg and ten into Hluhluwe-Umfolozi, each up to 45 years old. The killings stopped. Older males, it turned out, suppress musth in younger ones and keep their aggression in check.

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• 5. Calves and Dangers

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  A cow ovulates for the first time at age 11 and stays in oestrus for two to six days. After mating, she carries her calf for about 22 months, the longest gestation of any mammal. Between births, cows in Hwange National Park waited 3.9 to 4.7 years. In Amboseli National Park the average was five years. Where hunting pressure on adults was heavy in the 1970s, cows gave birth every 2.9 to 3.8 years.

  In October 1990, a birth was watched in Tsavo East National Park. Eighty elephants, including eight bulls, had gathered within 150 metres of the pregnant cow. Calves and cows stood close, rumbling and flapping their ears. Fluid ran from the labouring cow's temporal glands and ear canals, and she gave birth standing up. The calf rose within 30 minutes and walked 20 minutes later. About 100 minutes after the birth, the mother expelled the placenta and covered it with soil.

  Captive-born calves weigh 100 to 120 kilograms at birth and gain about half a kilogram a day. Cows nurse for around 4.8 years. For the first three months, calves drink only milk, and by two years they feed mostly on their own. During the first three years, sons suckle longer and grow faster than daughters. Afterwards, cows turn away sons more often than daughters. The species can live 70 to 75 years.

  Adults are considered safe from predators and often drive off lions by mobbing them. Calves under two are the usual targets, for lions and spotted hyenas. In Chobe National Park in Botswana, drought changed that. From 1993 to 1996, lions made successful attacks on 74 elephants. Twenty-six of the victims were older than nine, and one was a bull over 15. Most were killed at night. In October 2005, lions killed eight more, aged 1 to 11. Prides larger than 27 lions succeeded after dark against herds smaller than five elephants.

  Disease takes its own toll. At Etosha National Park, anthrax kills most elephants in November, at the end of the dry season. Vultures, jackals and hyaenas spread the spores after feeding on carcasses. Anthrax killed over 100 elephants in Botswana in 2019.

  From April to June 2020, more than 400 elephants died in Botswana's Okavango Delta region. They had drunk from shrinking waterholes thick with cyanobacteria. The neurotoxins left them confused, emaciated and finally paralysed in the legs. Investigators ruled out poaching, deliberate poisoning and anthrax.

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• 6. Ivory and Poison

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  The ivory trade targets bulls above all, because they carry the heavy tusks. The result is a skewed sex ratio that lowers a population's chances of survival. Corruption and civil wars have opened the way to unregulated black markets. The killing of the 1970s and 1980s is considered the largest in history. Between 2003 and 2015, rangers in 29 range countries reported 14,606 illegal killings.

  Seizures show the scale. In June 2002, Singapore confiscated a container holding more than 6.5 tonnes of ivory. It carried 42,120 hanko stamps and 532 tusks from southern Africa, centred on Zambia and its neighbours. Across 2005 and 2006-12 major consignments headed for Asia held 23.461 tonnes of ivory plus 91 tusks that were never weighed.

  Then, in 2006, the international ivory trade reopened. Demand and prices in Asia climbed. Chad's Zakouma National Park held 3,900 elephants in 2005. Within five years, more than 3,200 were killed. Guards were too few, and their weapons were outdated. Well-organised networks moved the ivory through Sudan. Chad later curtailed ivory smuggling through higher penalties and better law enforcement.

  Kenya felt the same pressure. In Samburu National Reserve, 41 bulls were killed illegally between 2008 and 2012. That equalled 31% of the reserve's elephants. From 2007 to 2013, about 10,370 tusks were seized in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Kenya and Uganda. Genetic analysis traced them to elephants killed in Tanzania, Mozambique, Zambia, Kenya and Uganda.

  Poachers sometimes poison carcasses so that circling vultures will not give them away. On the 20th of June 2019, northern Botswana yielded 537 dead endangered Old World vultures and two tawny eagles. Most were white-backed vultures, with 468 counted. Their deaths were suspected to follow feeding on three poisoned elephants.

  Heavy poaching also reshapes the animals themselves. Where it is intense, tusks get smaller, and more females are born without tusks. Males are rarely, if ever, born tuskless. In Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park, poaching during the civil war was followed by more tuskless females once the population recovered.

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• 7. Counting and Protecting

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  In 2008, the IUCN Red List rated the African elephant, then treated as a single species, as vulnerable. Since 2021, the bush elephant alone has been rated Endangered. Its global population had fallen by more than 50% over three generations. More than half its range lies outside protected areas.

  The 2016 estimate was 415,428 elephants, give or take 20,111. Only 30% of the range is protected. About 42% of the animals live in nine southern African countries. Botswana holds the largest population, at 131,626 plus or minus 12,508.

  Outcomes differ sharply by region. In Kruger National Park, numbers grew 4.2% a year from 2003 to 2015, after culling ended in the mid-1990s. At least 17,000 elephants lived in the park's vicinity in 2015, the most anywhere in South Africa. That growth is itself a problem for the park's environment, so conservationists use natural processes to hold numbers down.

  East Africa holds roughly 137,000 elephants in six countries. From 2006 to 2013, poaching cut the regional population by 62%. Tanzania, home to 80% of those elephants, lost the most. Somalia's resident population went locally extinct. South Sudan and Kenya saw increases.

  Ethiopia's story is bleaker. Elephants once ranged up to 2,500 metres. By the late 1970s, a single herd remained in the Dawa River valley and another near the Kenyan border. The 2015 estimate was between 1,900 and 2,151, down from 6,000 to 10,000 in the 1970s. In West and Central Africa, rapid human population growth leaves elephants in isolated, shrinking pockets.

  Land use is the main driver. Farms, plantations, cities, logging and mining have carved up the range and opened it to poachers. Farmers kill elephants that raid crops. Some elephants have also died after eating the invasive rubber vine.

  Protection has a paper trail. Both African elephant species were placed on Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora in 1989. Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe moved to Appendix II in 1997, and South Africa in 2000. The African Elephant Database began in 1986, pooling aerial surveys, dung counts, local interviews and poaching data. Community programmes have eased conflict with villagers. Researchers also found that recorded African bee sounds drive elephants away from settlements.

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• 8. Rock Art and Ancient Names

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  The oldest possible fossils of the species come from the Shungura Formation near Omo in Ethiopia. They date to between 2.44 and 2.27 million years ago. Another possible early record, from the Kanjera site in Kenya, is about 500,000 years old. Genetic analysis points to a major population expansion between 500,000 and 100,000 years ago. African and Asian elephants diverged about 7.6 million years ago. The bush elephant and the forest elephant split at least 1.9 million years ago, so they count as distinct species.

  Naming the species once produced a pile of errors. In 1900, Paul Matschie described two forms from Ethiopia and Tanzania. In 1907, Richard Lydekker named several more, assuming that ear size marked a distinct race. In 1948, Paulus Edward Pieris Deraniyagala described a North African elephant from Fayum in Egypt. Today all of these names are treated as synonyms.

  People were drawing elephants long before any naturalist named them. In Libya's Tadrart Acacus, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a carving dates to the last phase of the Pleistocene, between 12,000 and 8000 BC. It is rendered with remarkable realism. Neolithic rock art survives in south Oran in Algeria. At Phillip's Cave in the Erongo region of Namibia, the San painted a white elephant.

  In Kenya, the Maasai call the elephant Arkanjowe, a being that is large or powerful. They often regard elephants as akin to humans. A Maasai legend explains the animal's origin. A woman was walking to her partner's home to be married. She turned her back before arriving, and she shape-shifted into an elephant.

  The oldest dated images from southern Africa are in the Cederberg Wilderness Area in South Africa. San artists made them in the Bovidian period, between 3550 and 3070 BCE. Researchers read them as showing a symbolic association with elephants and a deep understanding of the communication, behaviour and social structure of elephant family units. They think the San may have developed a symbiotic relationship with elephants going back thousands of years.

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