40 Fun Facts About African Bush Elephant

Recordings of which insects are enough to drive African bush elephants away from human settlements?

Bees frighten African bush elephants so reliably that farmers now hang hives along their fences, protecting crops and selling the honey as a bonus.

African bush elephants hold the mammal record, at around 22 months, for the longest what?

Pregnancy lasts about 22 months in the African bush elephant, and the calf that finally arrives weighs around 100 kg and is walking within the hour.

Which African bush elephant, sold by London Zoo to P. T. Barnum, sparked a public outcry in 1882?

Jumbo's name gave English its word for huge, and 100,000 schoolchildren wrote to Queen Victoria begging her to stop his sale to America.

Which predators have learned to hunt young African bush elephants after dark in Chobe National Park?

Lions in Chobe brought down 74 elephants between 1993 and 1996, striking mostly at night during a drought when smaller prey had become scarce.

Wild African bush elephants tracked in a 2017 study set a mammal record for the least daily what?

Sleeping took up only about two hours a day for the two herd leaders tracked, and several times they went without any rest for nearly two days.

Which animals did orphaned young African bush elephant bulls stop killing once older bulls arrived?

Rhinos were dying in two South African parks, 63 in all, until bulls of up to 45 were brought in and the young males' premature musth shut down.

African bush elephants can swim for hours in deep water by using the trunk as which piece of kit?

Snorkel is the word for it: with only the trunk tip above the surface, an elephant can swim for up to six hours and cover 48 km without a rest.

Which everyday movement is a fully grown African bush elephant physically unable to make?

Jump is the one thing an elephant cannot do, and it cannot trot or gallop either, so even at full speed it never has all four legs in the air.

An African bush elephant's tusks, which never stop growing, are enlarged versions of which teeth?

Incisors form an elephant's tusks, which is the odd way round: the tusks of walruses, hippos and wild pigs are all overgrown canine teeth.

Which small, marmot-like mammal is one of the African bush elephant's closest living relatives?

Hyrax and elephant share an ancient ancestor, and it still shows in small details such as flattened nails where most mammals have curved claws.

African bush elephants flap their huge ears, which are laced with blood vessels, mainly to do what?

Shed body heat is the job: flapping fans air across the vessels, and this species, living in the hottest climates, has the largest ears of any elephant.

Which individual usually leads an African bush elephant family as it searches for food and water?

The matriarch is usually the oldest cow in the family, and when her time ends the role passes to her eldest daughter, not to one of her sisters.

Musth makes African bush elephant bulls aggressive for weeks through a surge of which hormone?

Testosterone can run at 60 times its usual level in a bull in musth, a word that comes from an Urdu term for intoxication.

Which country, home to the Okavango Delta, holds more African bush elephants than any other?

Botswana is home to around 130,000 African bush elephants, roughly a third of the total estimated across the whole continent in 2016.

Since 2021, the IUCN Red List has placed the African bush elephant in which threat category?

Endangered replaced an older shared listing of vulnerable after surveys showed the species had lost more than half its numbers in three generations.

Ivory, the prized material of an African bush elephant's tusks, consists mainly of which tissue?

Dentine makes up nearly all of a tusk, because the small cap of enamel at its tip is usually worn away within the first few years of life.

Which extinct Ice Age animal is closer kin to Asian elephants than African bush elephants are?

Woolly mammoth and Asian elephant are close cousins, whereas the African line had already branched away, at about the time humans split from chimpanzees.

African bush elephants on Mount Elgon walk deep into dark caves to mine what with their tusks?

Salt draws whole herds into Kitum Cave, where they gouge the walls with their tusks, and centuries of this mining have probably enlarged the cave.

At around 5 kg, the African bush elephant has the heaviest of which organ among all land animals?

Brain weight is one contest the elephant wins on land: at roughly 5 kg, the organ is about four times the size of a human's.

African bush elephants share which famous safari grouping with the leopard and the African buffalo?

The Big Five began as a hunters' label for the animals judged hardest to hunt on foot, and today the same animals are far more often sought by safari tourists.

Amboseli's African bush elephants bunch defensively at recorded voices of men from which people?

Maasai men are the voices the Amboseli herds have learned to fear, and the same words spoken by Maasai women or boys left them far calmer.

By uprooting trees, African bush elephants can gradually turn woodland into which other habitat?

Grassland takes over where the trees are thinned, and the same animals replant as they go by scattering the seeds of the fruit they eat.

Desert-adapted African bush elephants roam dry riverbeds in the Kunene Region of which country?

Namibia's desert herds often cover the 70 km between the Hoanib and Hoarusib rivers in a single night, when the air is cooler than by day.

Wartime poaching left many African bush elephant cows tuskless in which country's Gorongosa park?

Mozambique's civil war brought such heavy ivory poaching that tusked animals were picked off, and afterwards far more calves were born as tuskless females.

Which treaty has listed African elephants on its strictest appendix since 1989 to curb ivory sales?

CITES, also known as the Washington Convention, put African elephants on Appendix I in 1989, though four southern countries later won a looser listing.

Ivory from African elephant tusks was long the standard covering for which part of a piano?

The keys of a piano were topped with ivory until makers gave the material up in the 1970s, and a Connecticut village that milled it is still called Ivoryton.

Poachers poison African bush elephant carcasses to kill which birds, whose circling alerts rangers?

Vultures wheel in the sky above a fresh kill and give poachers away, so one poisoning of three carcasses in 2019 left 537 of the birds dead.

A 2014 genome study found African elephants carry some 2,000 receptor genes for which sense?

Smell is the sense an elephant leans on most, since its eyesight is comparatively weak, and that huge set of odour genes helps explain why.

African elephants carry 20 copies of the TP53 gene, humans just one, to ward off which disease?

Cancer ought to be common in an animal with so many cells and so long a life, yet it is rare, a puzzle that biologists call Peto's paradox.

In 1989, Kenya drew global attention by doing what to 12 tons of seized African elephant ivory?

Burning it made a media spectacle that inspired similar bonfires around the world, and Kenya went on to torch a record 105 tonnes in 2016.

A 2013 study suggested that African elephants may grasp the meaning of which human gesture?

Pointing joins a long list of signs of elephant intelligence that already included tool use, mimicry, self-awareness and apparent grief.

African bush elephants detect far-off rumbles travelling through the ground using which of these?

Feet act as receivers: an elephant sensing a tremor freezes, leans forward and presses more weight onto its larger front pair.

Which researcher began studying the African bush elephants of Amboseli National Park in 1972?

Cynthia Moss followed one cow, Echo, for more than 30 years, in what became the longest-running study of any land mammal.

An African bush elephant's trunk forms in the womb from the nose fused with which other feature?

Upper lip and nose merge early in fetal development, and the trunk that results holds up to 150,000 separate bundles of muscle.

Most African bush elephants favour one tusk over the other, a habit likened to which human trait?

Handedness is the comparison: an elephant is right- or left-tusked, and individuals also prefer to twist the trunk one particular way.

Which president placed Ahmed, a giant-tusked African bush elephant, under his protection by decree?

Jomo Kenyatta acted after schoolchildren sent him letters asking for Ahmed to be saved, and two hunters then watched the old bull day and night.

What was officially blamed for the deaths of hundreds of African bush elephants near the Okavango Delta in 2020?

Toxic cyanobacteria bloomed in drying waterholes, and the nerve poisons they make left elephants confused and then paralysed in the legs.

Which South African national park was founded in 1931 to save a herd reduced to eleven elephants?

Addo's herd had numbered about 130 until a hunter, called in after fruit farmers complained, shot some 120 of them in little more than a year.

The largest African bush elephant on record, a 3.96-metre bull, was shot in 1974 in which country?

Angola produced the biggest bull known, with an estimated weight of 10.4 tonnes against an average of about 6 for a fully grown male.

Though it can lift up to 350 kg, an African bush elephant's trunk contains none of which tissue?

Bone is absent from the trunk entirely, which lets it bend in any direction yet still crack a peanut shell without crushing the seed inside.