Wild African elephants address each other with name-like calls, a rare ability among animals. In one study, elephants responded to recorded calls addressed to them by calling back or walking toward the speaker, and they reacted less to calls meant for other elephants. A machine-learning model could predict which elephant a call was addressed to from the sound of the call alone, even when the call did not resemble the receiver's own voice. In the same research, elephants used name-like calls more over long distances and when adults were talking to calves. Dolphins and parrots address each other by copying the other's call, but the elephants appear not to copy, which is more like human names.
Elephants make low rumbling sounds, and some of them are too low for people to hear. Elephants make sounds at a frequency below 20 hertz, the lower limit of what people can hear. Katy Payne first realized this in 1984, at a zoo in Portland, Oregon. Elephants make their deep rumbles with a flexible larynx, long loose vocal cords, and the large chamber formed by the mouth and trunk. In dense forest the higher parts of a sound are lost, so the very low part of an elephant rumble is what travels far. Rumbles can be heard by other elephants from more than 2 miles (3 kilometers) away. Stomping and low rumbling also create seismic waves in the ground, and elephants may feel these vibrations through their feet and trunks.
Smell and touch are very important senses for elephants, and they reach out with the trunk to smell things. Asian elephants have a vomeronasal organ that detects pheromones and other chemical signals, and they bring those signals to it with the trunk. Elephants touch each other with their trunks to greet and to reassure one another. A count of the cells in one African elephant brain found about 257 billion neurons. Of these, 97.5 percent, or 251 billion, are in the cerebellum, a very unusual share compared with other mammals. In a mirror test, only one of three Asian elephants, named Happy, passed the mark test. She touched a visible mark on her head with her trunk but ignored an invisible control mark.
A trunk has about 150,000 muscle units, and elephants widen their nostrils by up to 30 percent, which thins the trunk wall and makes the inside of the trunk about 64 percent bigger, so it can hold more water. A trunk can suck up 3.7 liters of water in 1.5 seconds, as much as 20 toilets flushing at once, and elephants can store up to nine liters of water in the trunk, which works like a suitcase that expands when it needs to. Elephants inhale at speeds that are comparable to Japan's 300-mph bullet trains, according to the Georgia Tech team. In elephant bones the inner cavity is lacking, and a network of dense perforated bone fills the space, which makes the bones stronger.
An elephant eats about 165 to 330 pounds (74 to 150 kilograms) of food a day because it digests only about 44 percent of what it eats. As of November 2026, the largest elephant on record was a male African savanna elephant. It weighed about 24,000 pounds (10,886 kilograms) and stood 13 feet (3.96 meters) tall at the shoulder. Scientists who fitted two wild African elephants in Botswana with monitors found they slept an average of about two hours a day, much of it standing up. An elephant can go through up to six sets of molars in its lifetime. Very old elephants whose last teeth are worn down often live in marshes where plants are soft, which led some people to think elephants had special burial grounds.
A tusk is a long front tooth that keeps growing, and elephants use their tusks to dig for water and food. Scientists think elephants favor a right or a left tusk, just as people favor a right or left hand, and genes decide whether an elephant inherits tusks from its parents, much as genes decide eye color in people. In the dry season, elephants dig up dry riverbeds and make watering holes that many other animals can drink from. Elephant dung is full of seeds, which helps plants spread across the land. Forest elephants scatter seeds far from the trees that grew them: they eat favorite fruits and spread the seeds through their dung as they walk. When elephants feed on trees, they make paths and gaps in the forest that smaller animals can use. Elephants are a keystone species, which means they play a critical role in their ecosystem.
Three kinds of elephants are recognized: African savanna elephants, African forest elephants and Asian elephants. African elephants live on the savannas and in the rain forests of Africa, while Asian elephants live in India and Southeast Asia. Savanna elephants have curving tusks, and forest elephants have straighter tusks. Elephants live in family groups called herds, and an African elephant herd is led by an older female called the matriarch, although Asian elephant herds do not have a matriarch the way African elephant herds do. Other members of the herd help look after calves, the newborn elephants that stand about 3 feet (1 meter) tall. When a predator comes near, elephants in a herd clump together to protect the young.
As of November 2026, IUCN assessors report that African forest elephants fell by more than 86 percent over 31 years and savanna elephants by at least 60 percent over 50 years. The IUCN's 2021 assessment said that sharp declines in African elephants since 2008 came with a big rise in poaching that peaked in 2011 but continued to threaten populations. Illegal ivory poaching is one of the biggest threats to African elephants. Elephant habitats also shrink as people spread out and turn land into farms and towns. Asian elephants hang on in only about 5 percent of their historical range, and there may be fewer than 50,000 in the wild. In a nine-year Kenyan study, elephants approaching small farms avoided beehive fences with live honey bees up to 86 percent of the time during peak crop seasons.
Words to know
- cerebellum: a brain part
- larynx: voice box
- hertz: waves per second
- keystone: a key kind
- matriarch: lead female
- poaching: illegal hunting
