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 that elephants make sounds too low for people to hear in 1984, at a zoo in Portland, Oregon. Elephant rumbles can be heard by other elephants from more than 2 miles (3 kilometers) away, and elephant stomping and low rumbling create seismic waves in the ground, which elephants may feel through their feet and trunks as vibrations. Smell and touch are also very important senses for elephants, and they reach out with the trunk to smell things.

Now let's look at the trunk and how elephants use it. Elephants can store up to nine liters of water in the trunk, which works like a suitcase that expands when it needs to, and elephants inhale at speeds that are comparable to Japan's 300-mph bullet trains, according to the Georgia Tech team. Besides grabbing and drinking, an elephant uses its trunk to smell, snorkel, spray dust, touch, sort things and make sounds. Asian elephants have a vomeronasal organ that detects pheromones and other chemical signals, and they bring those signals to it with the trunk. Elephants also touch each other with their trunks to greet and to reassure one another.

Wild African elephants address each other with name-like calls, a rare ability among animals. In a test, 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. Another test looked at the elephant mind. In a mirror test, only one of three Asian elephants, named Happy, passed the mark test, because Happy touched a visible mark on her head with her trunk but ignored an invisible control mark. 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.

Now let's look at the body. In elephant bones the inner cavity is lacking. A network of dense perforated bone fills the space, which makes the bones stronger. An elephant walks on its toes and has a thick, fibrous pad on the bottom of each foot that works as a shock absorber. It 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. 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. As of November 2026, the largest elephant on record was a male African savanna elephant that weighed about 24,000 pounds (10,886 kilograms).

Elephants wear out their teeth: 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. 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. African elephants in the wild can live up to about 70 years. 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.

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, and a newborn African elephant weighs roughly 90 to 120 kilograms (about 200 to 260 pounds). Other members of the herd help look after calves. When a predator comes near, elephants in a herd clump together to protect the young.

Elephants are a keystone species, which means they play a critical role in their ecosystem. In the dry season, they use their tusks to 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. Woolly mammoths were extinct relatives of today's elephants that lived in the Ice Age. A woolly mammoth was covered in long, shaggy hair that kept it warm. Mammoths lived on cold, treeless tundra, not on glaciers, and used their long, curved tusks to dig under the snow for food. Scientists are not sure exactly why woolly mammoths went extinct.

The Great Elephant Census found a 30 percent decline in African savanna elephants over seven years. 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. A 2016 IUCN report estimated about 415,000 African elephants, savanna and forest elephants together. Asian elephants hang on in only about 5 percent of their historical range, and there may be fewer than 50,000 in the wild. Illegal ivory poaching is one of the biggest threats to African elephants. Elephant habitats shrink as people spread out and turn land into farms and towns. Fences with live beehives help keep elephants away from farms, because elephants avoid bees and fear being stung.

Words to know

• hertz: waves per second
• seismic: of ground shaking
• neurons: brain cells
• matriarch: lead female
• keystone: a key kind
• tundra: cold treeless land