Elephants widen their nostrils by up to 30 percent. This 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. That is as much as 20 toilets flushing at once. Georgia Tech researchers found that elephants are the only animals able to use suction on land and underwater. Still, an elephant does not drink through its trunk like a straw. It sucks water part of the way up. Then it curls the trunk toward its mouth and pours the water in. A trunk has about 150,000 muscle units.

An elephant eats about 165 to 330 pounds (74 to 150 kilograms) of food a day. That is because it digests only about 44 percent of what it eats. Adult African elephants weigh from about 2 to 7 tons (2,000 to 6,100 kilograms). They stand up to about 13 feet (4 meters) tall at the shoulder. 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. An elephant walks on its toes. It has a thick, fibrous pad on the bottom of each foot that works as a shock absorber.

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. Each new tooth grows in from behind and pushes the old one forward like a conveyor belt. Very old elephants whose last teeth are worn down often live in marshes where plants are soft. That led some people to think elephants had special burial grounds. African elephants in the wild can live up to about 70 years.

Elephants make low rumbling sounds, and some of them are too low for people to hear. Other elephants can hear a rumble from more than 2 miles (3 kilometers) away. Smell and touch are very important senses for elephants, and they reach out with the trunk to smell things. Elephants touch each other with their trunks to greet and to reassure one another. The trunk is strong enough to lift a large tree trunk and gentle enough to pick up a single piece of straw. Besides grabbing and drinking, an elephant uses it to smell, snorkel, spray dust, touch, sort things and make sounds.

A tusk is a long front tooth that keeps growing. 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. 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. 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.

Elephants live in family groups called herds. An African elephant herd is led by an older female called the matriarch. 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. An elephant mother carries her calf for about 22 months before it is born. A newborn elephant, called a calf, stands about 3 feet (1 meter) tall. Other members of the herd help look after calves. When a predator comes near, elephants in a herd clump together to protect the young.

Three kinds of elephants are recognized: African savanna elephants, African forest elephants and Asian elephants. 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. As of November 2026, illegal ivory poaching is one of the biggest threats to African elephants. As of November 2026, elephant habitats also shrink as people spread out and turn land into farms and towns. Some farmers have found one answer. Fences with live beehives help keep elephants away from farms, because elephants avoid bees and fear being stung.

Words to know

• suction: pulling by vacuum
• matriarch: lead female
• keystone: a key kind
• poaching: illegal hunting
• molars: chewing teeth