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, while African elephants have big ears shaped a bit like the continent of Africa and Asian elephants have smaller ears. 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. Adult male elephants, called bulls, tend to live alone or in small groups of other males. Other members of the herd help look after calves, the newborn elephants that stand about 3 feet (1 meter) tall, and when a predator comes near, elephants in a herd clump together to protect the young.
Wild African elephants address each other with name-like calls, a rare ability among animals. 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. 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. Smell and touch are also very important senses for elephants. Elephants touch each other with their trunks to greet and to reassure one another.
Elephants make low rumbling sounds, and some of them are too low for people to hear, since 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. Other elephants can hear it from more than 2 miles (3 kilometers) away. Elephant stomping and low rumbling also create seismic waves in the ground, and elephants may feel these vibrations through their feet and trunks. A herd watched in Namibia would freeze with ears flat, lean forward onto tiptoes and sometimes lift a foot.
A count of the cells in one African elephant brain found about 257 billion neurons, and that brain is about three times larger than a human brain. Of these neurons, 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. 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. Elephants have also evolved extra copies of a gene that fights tumor cells, and humans and other mammals have only one copy. In elephant bones the inner cavity is lacking, and a network of dense perforated bone fills the space, which makes the bones stronger.
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 Georgia Tech researchers found that elephants are the only animals able to use suction on land and underwater. Elephants can store up to nine liters of water in the trunk, which works like a suitcase that expands when it needs to, and they inhale at speeds that are comparable to Japan's 300-mph bullet trains, according to the Georgia Tech team. An elephant does not drink through its trunk like a straw: it sucks water part of the way up, curls the trunk toward its mouth and pours the water in.
Elephants are a keystone species, which means they play a critical role in their ecosystem. When elephants feed on trees, they make paths and gaps in the forest that smaller animals can use. In the dry season, elephants dig up dry riverbeds and make watering holes that many other animals can drink from. 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. 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. A field study across three forest sites in Gabon found seeds in most elephant dung. In some Gabon forests, elephants mostly spread seeds of trees that store a lot of carbon.
A tusk is a long front tooth that keeps growing, and scientists think elephants favor a right or a left tusk, just as people favor a right or left hand. Genes decide whether an elephant inherits tusks from its parents, much as genes decide eye color in people. An elephant can go through up to six sets of molars in its lifetime, and each new tooth grows in from behind and pushes the old one forward like a conveyor belt. As of November 2026, tusklessness, once rare in African savanna elephants, has become more common where intense ivory poaching happened. In Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park, after the 1977 to 1992 war years of intense ivory poaching, half of the surviving females were naturally tuskless. Before the war, fewer than a fifth of the females were tuskless.
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. Elephant numbers can grow only about 5 to 6 percent a year, so where poaching took 8 to 9 percent a year, as the African Wildlife Foundation reported, births could not make up the losses. The same assessment found some good news: some forest elephants had stabilised in well-managed conservation areas in Gabon and the Republic of the Congo, and African savanna elephant numbers had been stable or growing for decades in the Kavango-Zambezi area, which holds the continent's largest subpopulation.
In its 2021 assessment the IUCN said African forest elephants occupy only about a quarter of their historic range. The largest remaining populations are in Gabon and the Republic of the Congo. The Great Elephant Census found a 30 percent decline in African savanna elephants over seven years, and a 2016 IUCN report estimated about 415,000 African elephants, savanna and forest elephants together. As of November 2026, Asian elephants hang on in only about 5 percent of their historical range, and there may be fewer than 50,000 in the wild. Elephant habitats shrink as people spread out and turn land into farms and towns, and illegal ivory poaching is one of the biggest threats to African elephants. 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. Fences with live beehives help keep elephants away from farms, because elephants avoid bees and fear being stung.
Words to know
- tusklessness: having no tusks
- cerebellum: a brain part
- keystone: a key kind
- matriarch: lead female
- poaching: illegal hunting
- seismic: of ground shaking
