African Bush Elephant
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40 free African Bush Elephant trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The African bush elephant is the largest animal walking the Earth today, and almost everything about it is outsized: the appetite, the ears, the tusks, the memory and the length of its childhood. It is also full of surprises, from the things it fears to the odd relatives hiding in its family tree. This quiz turns the best fun facts about African bush elephants into questions. It covers how the trunk, tusks and ears work, how herds are organised and how calves grow up, what the animals eat and how they talk to each other across long distances, plus the famous individuals, the parks and countries where they live, and the poaching and habitat loss that threaten them. It suits wildlife fans, students and teachers, safari planners and anyone who likes a good animal fact. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will finish knowing a great deal more about the giant of the savanna than when you started.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Recordings of which insects are enough to drive African bush elephants away from human settlements?
Bees
Bees frighten African bush elephants so reliably that farmers now hang hives along their fences, protecting crops and selling the honey as a bonus.
Q 02African bush elephants hold the mammal record, at around 22 months, for the longest what?
Pregnancy
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.
Q 03Which African bush elephant, sold by London Zoo to P. T. Barnum, sparked a public outcry in 1882?
Jumbo
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.
Q 04Which predators have learned to hunt young African bush elephants after dark in Chobe National Park?
Lions
Lions in Chobe brought down 74 elephants between 1993 and 1996, striking mostly at night during a drought when smaller prey had become scarce.
Q 05Wild African bush elephants tracked in a 2017 study set a mammal record for the least daily what?
Sleeping
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.
Q 06Which animals did orphaned young African bush elephant bulls stop killing once older bulls arrived?
Rhinos
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.
Q 07African bush elephants can swim for hours in deep water by using the trunk as which piece of kit?
Snorkel
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.
Q 08Which everyday movement is a fully grown African bush elephant physically unable to make?
Jump
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.
Q 09An African bush elephant's tusks, which never stop growing, are enlarged versions of which teeth?
Incisors
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.
Q 10Which small, marmot-like mammal is one of the African bush elephant's closest living relatives?
Hyrax
Hyrax and elephant share an ancient ancestor, and it still shows in small details such as flattened nails where most mammals have curved claws.
Q 11African bush elephants flap their huge ears, which are laced with blood vessels, mainly to do what?
Shed body heat
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.
Q 12Which individual usually leads an African bush elephant family as it searches for food and water?
The matriarch
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.
Q 13Musth makes African bush elephant bulls aggressive for weeks through a surge of which hormone?
Testosterone
Q 21Amboseli's African bush elephants bunch defensively at recorded voices of men from which people?
Maasai
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.
Q 22By uprooting trees, African bush elephants can gradually turn woodland into which other habitat?
Grassland
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.
Q 23Desert-adapted African bush elephants roam dry riverbeds in the Kunene Region of which country?
Namibia
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.
Testosterone can run at 60 times its usual level in a bull in musth, a word that comes from an Urdu term for intoxication.
Q 14Which country, home to the Okavango Delta, holds more African bush elephants than any other?
Botswana
Botswana is home to around 130,000 African bush elephants, roughly a third of the total estimated across the whole continent in 2016.
Q 15Since 2021, the IUCN Red List has placed the African bush elephant in which threat category?
Endangered
Endangered replaced an older shared listing of vulnerable after surveys showed the species had lost more than half its numbers in three generations.
Q 16Ivory, the prized material of an African bush elephant's tusks, consists mainly of which tissue?
Dentine
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.
Q 17Which extinct Ice Age animal is closer kin to Asian elephants than African bush elephants are?
Woolly mammoth
Woolly mammoth and Asian elephant are close cousins, whereas the African line had already branched away, at about the time humans split from chimpanzees.
Q 18African bush elephants on Mount Elgon walk deep into dark caves to mine what with their tusks?
Salt
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.
Q 19At around 5 kg, the African bush elephant has the heaviest of which organ among all land animals?
Brain
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.
Q 20African bush elephants share which famous safari grouping with the leopard and the African buffalo?
The Big Five
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.
Q 24Wartime poaching left many African bush elephant cows tuskless in which country's Gorongosa park?
Mozambique
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.
Q 25Which treaty has listed African elephants on its strictest appendix since 1989 to curb ivory sales?
CITES
CITES, also known as the Washington Convention, put African elephants on Appendix I in 1989, though four southern countries later won a looser listing.
Q 26Ivory from African elephant tusks was long the standard covering for which part of a piano?
The keys
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.
Q 27Poachers poison African bush elephant carcasses to kill which birds, whose circling alerts rangers?
Vultures
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.
Q 28A 2014 genome study found African elephants carry some 2,000 receptor genes for which sense?
Smell
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.
Q 29African elephants carry 20 copies of the TP53 gene, humans just one, to ward off which disease?
Cancer
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.
Q 30In 1989, Kenya drew global attention by doing what to 12 tons of seized African elephant ivory?
Burning it
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.