40 Fun Facts About Asian Elephant

Which extinct animals were closer relatives of the Asian elephant than living African elephants are?

Mammoths sit inside the living elephant family tree, nearer to Asian elephants than African ones; the last of them survived on Wrangel Island until about 4,000 years ago.

The tusks of a bull Asian elephant are greatly enlarged versions of which teeth in the upper jaw?

Incisors, not canines, grow into an elephant's tusks: they are the second pair in the upper jaw, and most cow Asian elephants have only tiny ones or none.

Which country, once Lan Xang, the 'Land of a Million Elephants', has the Asian elephant as its national animal?

Laos shares the honour with Thailand, and its forerunner Lan Xang, founded by Fa Ngum in 1353, lasted for three and a half centuries.

What is the yearly period called when a bull Asian elephant's testosterone soars and he turns aggressive?

Musth comes from an Urdu term for intoxication: testosterone can reach up to 100 times its usual level, and a tar-like fluid seeps from glands on the bull's temples.

Hansken, an Asian elephant that toured 17th-century Europe doing tricks, was sketched by which Dutch artist?

Rembrandt drew Hansken in chalk after seeing her in Amsterdam in 1637; a skeleton in Florence thought to be hers is the reference specimen for the whole species.

Kosik, an Asian elephant at a South Korean theme park, made headlines in 2006 by using his trunk to imitate what?

Human speech was Kosik's party trick: with his trunk in his mouth he sounded out Korean words including those for yes, no, sit and lie down.

Which movement is impossible for an Asian elephant, as for all elephants, along with trotting and galloping?

Jumping is beyond any elephant, yet they walk backwards easily and can swim for up to six hours without touching the bottom.

Asian elephants make deep growls too low-pitched for people to hear; what is this kind of sound called?

Infrasound is only part of the repertoire: a growl that resonates in the trunk becomes a rumble, and for long-distance calls it swells into a roar.

Which predators have been recorded killing adult Asian elephants in India's Corbett and Kaziranga national parks?

Tigers killed a 20-year-old cow in Corbett and, hunting together, a sick bull in Kaziranga; healthy adult elephants are otherwise almost immune to predators.

Asian elephants of which colour, sacred to Siam's kings, gave English a phrase for a costly, unwanted possession?

White elephants are not truly white but pale and pinkish, and Thai law long required anyone who found one to present it to the king.

Apart from other elephants, which animals join the little hyraxes as the Asian elephant's closest living relatives?

Manatees and dugongs, known as sirenians, sit with elephants and hyraxes in a clade called Paenungulata, part of the wider Afrotheria.

Which Hindu god, revered as the remover of obstacles, has an elephant's head with one whole tusk and one broken?

Ganesha's earliest name was Ekadanta, meaning One Tusked, and some of his oldest images show him holding the broken tusk in his own hand.

In chaturanga, the Indian ancestor of chess, the elephant piece was the forerunner of which modern chessman?

Bishop is the modern name for the old alfil, meaning elephant, which moved two squares diagonally; Spanish players call the piece an alfil to this day.

Which island's so-called pygmy elephants may descend from a captive herd of Asian elephants kept by a sultan?

Borneo's elephants live in the island's north-east and are notably tame; genetic work suggests they split from other Asian elephants about 300,000 years ago.

What Hindi-derived name is given to the keeper who traditionally stays with one Asian elephant all its working life?

Mahout traces back to the Sanskrit mahamatra, and mahouts have ridden and trained elephants since antiquity, in war as well as at work.

What is the seat or carriage on an Asian elephant's back called, once used by rulers for processions and hunting?

Howdah comes, through Hindi, from an Arabic word for a bed carried by a camel, and ancient war elephants bore castle-like versions holding archers.

Which term for animals most active at dawn and dusk describes Asian elephants, which feed for much of the day?

Crepuscular habits leave plenty of time to eat: Asian elephants spend 50 to 75% of the day feeding, on at least 112 different plant species.

What are the temporary all-male bands called that young bull Asian elephants may join after leaving their mothers?

Bachelor groups are loose and short-lived: bulls leave at adolescence, live mostly alone, and join the cow herds only for a while to mate.

Which naturalist named the Asian elephant in 1758, drawing partly on specimens later shown to be African elephants?

Carl Linnaeus named the species in the 10th edition of Systema Naturae, leaning heavily on a 1693 description of an elephant skeleton by John Ray.

Which country's only wild Asian elephants, a few hundred animals, live in Xishuangbanna and two nearby prefectures?

China gives its elephants first-level protection, and Xishuangbanna has planted bananas and bamboo as food bases to ease clashes with people.

Which IUCN Red List category has the Asian elephant held since 1986, its numbers having at least halved?

Endangered status reflects a fall of at least 50% over three elephant generations, about 60 to 75 years, driven by habitat loss and poaching.

Engraved seals from which Bronze Age civilisation give the earliest signs of Asian elephants being kept in captivity?

Indus Valley sites such as Mohenjo-daro have also yielded elephant remains and clay models, suggesting the animals were tamed and put to work.

Which conqueror's army faced the armoured war elephants of King Porus at the Battle of the Hydaspes in 326 BC?

Alexander the Great won after his infantry drove the elephants back with javelins and axes; by one ancient tally it cost him more men than Gaugamela.

Abul-Abbas, an elephant sent from Baghdad by the caliph Harun al-Rashid, was a gift for which European emperor?

Charlemagne received Abul-Abbas at Aachen in July 802, after the elephant had landed near Genoa and been marched over the Alps.

Hanno, an elephant shipped from Lisbon to Rome in 1514, was the gift of Portugal's King Manuel I to which pope?

Pope Leo X doted on Hanno, and when the elephant died two years after arriving, Raphael designed a memorial fresco and the pope himself wrote the epitaph.

During Kandy's Esala Perahera, the lead tusker carries a casket in honour of which sacred Buddhist relic?

The Buddha's tooth relic reached the island in the 4th century; a tusker named Raja bore its casket for 37 years and was declared a national treasure.

In Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book stories, which elephant leader takes his name from the Hindi word for elephant?

Hathi heads the elephant troop, stands for order and the Law of the Jungle, and is famed for his patience, never hurrying unless he must.

Ruby, an Asian elephant at the Phoenix Zoo, won fame for which activity after scratching the dirt with a stick?

Painting came easily to Ruby: handed a brush by her keepers, she finished an abstract picture in about ten minutes, and her work sold for as much as $25,000.

A haemorrhagic disease that is often fatal to young Asian elephant calves is caused by which family of viruses?

Herpesviruses known as EEHV kill up to 80% of severely affected Asian elephants, yet healthy herd-mates can carry and shed them in trunk secretions.

Which southern Indian state is home to more wild Asian elephants than any other in the country?

Karnataka's elephants are spread over roughly 38,000 square kilometres of the state, by one estimate.

What are tuskless bull Asian elephants called, a type so common in Sri Lanka that only 7% of males have tusks?

Makhnas are echoed in the Burmese zodiac, where the tusked elephant is the sign of Wednesday morning and the tuskless one of Wednesday afternoon.

Which feature does an Asian elephant's trunk have just one of at its tip, where an African elephant's has two?

A grasping finger is all the Asian species gets at the trunk tip, so it tends to wrap the trunk around food and squeeze rather than pinch.

Asian elephants flap their ears, which are rich in fine blood vessels, mainly as a way of doing what?

Cooling down is the aim: warm blood flowing through the ears' capillaries gives off heat, and elephants only have sweat glands between their toes.

Happy, an Asian elephant at the Bronx Zoo, showed self-awareness by touching an X marked on herself in which experiment?

The mirror test worked because Happy could see the X only in her reflection; she ignored a second, colourless mark added as a control.

James 'Elephant Bill' Williams worked in Burma with Asian elephants that hauled logs of which valuable timber?

Teak was called as important a munition of war as steel, and the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation that hired Williams in 1920 used 2,000 elephants.

Up to how long can an Asian elephant cow be pregnant before bearing a calf that weighs about 100 kg?

Nearly 2 years is the top of an 18 to 22 month range; the calf is fully formed by month 19 but stays put to grow tall enough to reach its mother's milk.

About how much vegetation does an adult Asian elephant, a grazer and browser, eat in a single day?

150 kg of plants is a normal day's intake, washed down with 80 to 200 litres of water, and the animals are never far from a permanent source.

Most of the 36 Sumatran elephants found dead in Aceh between 2012 and 2015 lay near plantations of which crop?

Palm oil plantations block the elephants' foraging routes, so the animals often try to tear them down; these died by poison, traps and electrocution.

In Hindu mythology, Airavata, the many-tusked king of elephants, serves as the mount of which god?

Indra rides Airavata when he defeats Vritra, and the elephant, known in Thailand as Erawan, also stands guard at the entrance to his palace.

Which of these is entirely missing from an Asian elephant's trunk, despite its many thousands of muscle bundles?

Bones are absent from the trunk, which has little fat either: it works as a muscular hydrostat, moved by muscles pulling with and against each other.