African bush elephant

Name and taxonomy

The genus name Loxodonta probably refers to the lozenge-shaped ridges on the elephant's molars. The type locality was fixed on the Orange River in South Africa in 1926. During the 19th and 20th centuries, museum curators named many local forms as subspecies. Paul Matschie described two in 1900, and Richard Lydekker named six more in 1907 on the basis of ear size. A North African form was named from Fayum in Egypt in 1948. All those names are now treated as synonyms, and no subspecies are recognised.

For most of the 20th century the bush elephant and the forest elephant counted as one species. Nuclear DNA shows the two lines parted at least 1.9 million years ago, so they are now separate species. The IUCN assessed them separately for the first time in 2021. The bush elephant belongs to the order Proboscidea and the family Elephantidae, which it shares with the Asian elephant. iNaturalist holds 30,254 observations of the species, more than for most large mammals.

Evolution and relatives

African and Asian elephants split about 7.6 million years ago, according to a study of mitochondrial genomes. The woolly mammoth and the American mastodon are extinct cousins on the same family tree. Some authors think L. africana descends from Loxodonta atlantica, an older African elephant. The fossil record of the species is thin. The earliest possible remains come from the Shungura Formation near the Omo River in Ethiopia, dated to about 2.44 to 2.27 million years ago.

Another early record comes from Kanjera in Kenya, around 500,000 years ago. Genetic analysis points to a large expansion of the population between 500,000 and 100,000 years ago. Bush and forest elephants may have exchanged genes after their split, which is why the line between them stays disputed.

Appearance

A bull stands 3.04 to 3.36 metres at the shoulder and weighs 5.2 to 6.9 tonnes. A cow stands 2.47 to 2.73 metres and weighs 2.6 to 3.5 tonnes. Across the species, shoulder height runs from 2.47 to 3.36 metres, with a record of 3.96. The back is markedly concave, and the forehead is bulbous in a bull and more angular in a cow. The skin is grey, thick and creased, with few hairs, and a mud bath leaves it the colour of the local soil.

The ears are pointed and triangular and cover the whole shoulder, growing up to 2 by 1.5 metres. Large blood vessels run close to the surface on the inner side, and flapping the ears sheds heat. The trunk is a fused nose and upper lip, and it ends in two finger-like tips that can pick up small objects. The cracks in the skin hold water and help cool the animal by evaporation. The tail is 100 to 150 centimetres long with a bulb of coarse hair at the end.

Both sexes carry tusks, which are upper incisors that grow for life. They erupt at 1 to 3 years, and bull tusks grow faster than cow tusks. At 60 years a bull's tusks average 109 kilograms and a cow's 17.7 kg. The longest known tusk measured 3.51 metres and weighed 117 kg. Six molars per jaw quarter move forward and wear out one after another, like a conveyor belt. When the sixth molar is gone, the elephant can no longer chew and starves.

Habitat and range

The bush elephant uses almost every habitat in Africa except the driest desert and the deep rainforest. It lives in dry and flooded grassland, woodland, wetland, scrub, mountain forest and farmland, from sea level up to 4,000 metres. In Mali and Namibia small populations live in desert and semi-desert. Human density decides where elephants survive, so they persist mostly in land too poor or too disease-ridden for farming.

The species survives in about 30 countries, between Senegal, Somalia and South Africa. It has gone from Burundi, the Gambia and Mauritania, and it was shot out of Eswatini before being brought back. Botswana holds more than any other country, at about 130,000 animals. East Africa holds roughly 137,000 across six countries, and 80% of those live in Tanzania. Kruger National Park in South Africa holds at least 17,000, and its herds grew by 4.2% a year between 2003 and 2015.

Home ranges are vast: one study recorded ranges of 102 to 5,527 square kilometres over 25 months. GBIF holds records from 50 countries, but that count includes zoos and does not show the native range.

Diet and feeding

The bush elephant is a mixed feeder that eats both grass and browse. One study recorded more than 150 plant species eaten over a year. In grassland, grass can make up over 70% of the diet, while in dense forest the diet is all browse. On the savanna the herds switch to grass in the rains and back to leaves, bark and roots in the dry season. An adult eats about 150 kilograms of plants a day and spends over 17 hours a day feeding.

The trunk pulls up grass, strips leaves and lifts food to the mouth. The tusks break branches, peel bark and dig for roots. An elephant will push over a whole tree to reach its crown or its roots, and this habit can turn woodland into grassland.

Elephants drink 180 to 230 litres of water a day. The trunk draws up about 3 litres at a time and sprays it into the mouth. They seek out salt: mineral licks, termite mounds, waterholes rich in sodium and even wood ash in Kruger and by Lake Kariba. Fruit passes through the gut, so elephants plant seeds wherever they leave dung.

Behaviour and social life

The heart of elephant society is the family unit: several adult cows, their daughters and their young sons. The oldest cow, the matriarch, leads the family and often a wider kinship group of two or more families with close ties. Groups share the work of finding food and water, defending calves and raising them, a habit called allomothering. Herds swell in the wet season and in open country, and shrink in the dry season.

Young bulls drift away from the family between 10 and 19 years of age. They wander alone for a while or join small groups of other bulls. A 2020 study found that old bulls guide these groups and matter for their survival, which raises concern about trophy hunting. When orphaned young bulls grew up without elders in two South African parks, they killed 63 rhinoceroses in the 1990s. The killing stopped when older bulls were brought in, because elders suppress the musth of younger males.

Elephants are active for most of the 24 hours and sleep only about 4 hours in total. They walk at about 6 kilometres per hour and can run at up to 24 km/h. A herd may move only 1.5 kilometres a day when food is close, or up to 40 km when it is scarce. They bathe in water and coat themselves in mud and dust, which keeps the skin moist and holds off parasites. Elephants show grief, play, tool use, mimicry and cooperation, and they seem to understand human pointing.

Communication and senses

Elephants talk mostly in rumbles, and most of the rumble lies below what a human ear can hear. These infrasonic calls, at around 20 hertz, travel long distances and carry news of mates and rivals. Other elephants can hear such a call from more than 2 kilometres away. Audible growls serve as greetings, and a growl can build into a roar as a threat. A trumpet, blown through the trunk, means excitement, distress or anger. Calves squeal when frightened and gurgle in play, while adults scream to intimidate.

Touch matters as much as sound. A lower ranking elephant greets a superior by placing the tip of its trunk in the other's mouth. Mothers reassure calves with touches and foot rubs, and slap them to discipline. Courting pairs twine their trunks, and fighting bulls wrestle with them. Bulls in musth mark trees with their tusks and leave trails of strong-smelling urine, which cows follow by scent.

Reproduction and life cycle

Cows first ovulate at about 11 years and come into heat for 2 to 6 days every 14 to 16 weeks. Bulls can produce sperm from about 15, but they rarely breed until their first musth at 25 or 30. Musth is a period of high testosterone: the temporal glands swell and stream, urine dribbles, and the bull turns aggressive. Young bulls have short bouts of a few days, while old bulls stay in musth for 2 to 5 months a year. Cows prefer bulls in musth, and most mating happens in and just after the rains.

A bull in musth walks long distances after the low calls of cows and joins large family groups. A cow may run from bulls she does not want, and once she chooses, the favoured bull chases the others off. Gestation lasts about 22 months. One calf is usual, and twins are rare. In Hwange National Park a cow calves every 3.9 to 4.7 years, and in Amboseli once in 5 years on average.

A newborn weighs 90 to 120 kilograms, stands within 30 minutes and walks 20 minutes later. It drinks only milk for its first three months, then starts to feed itself, though suckling can go on for up to three years. Cows lactate for about 4.8 years, and the whole herd helps teach the calf to use its trunk. A calf is fully independent at about 8 years. Wild elephants live 60 to 70 years, and the captive record is 65. The maximum lifespan is put at 70 to 75 years, when the last molars wear out.

Predators and threats

An adult elephant has no natural predator, and a herd mobs any lion that comes near. Lions and spotted hyenas take calves under two years, usually ones that lag behind at night. In Chobe National Park in Botswana, lions killed 74 elephants between 1993 and 1996, and 26 of them were older than nine. Those hunts succeeded after dark, when the pride had more than 27 lions and the herd fewer than 5 elephants.

Disease kills more. Anthrax strikes at the end of the dry season, and a 2019 outbreak in Botswana killed more than 100 animals. In 2020 more than 400 died in the Okavango Delta after drinking from shrinking waterholes full of toxic cyanobacteria.

The largest threats are people. Farms, plantations, roads and towns break the range into pieces, and the elephants raid crops in return. Poachers kill bulls for their tusks, which skews the sex ratio and removes the elders herds depend on. Rangers in 29 countries reported 14,606 elephants poached between 2003 and 2015. In Chad's Zakouma National Park, more than 3,200 of 3,900 elephants died in five years after 2005. Heavy poaching selects for tuskless cows, as seen in Gorongosa in Mozambique after the civil war.

Population and conservation

The IUCN Red List has rated the African bush elephant Endangered since 2021. The reason is a fall of more than 50% over three generations, or about 75 years. The 2016 census put the combined African elephant population at about 415,000. Only 30% of that area is protected, and more than half the range lies outside parks.

About 42% of all African elephants, some 293,447, live in nine southern African countries. Botswana's 131,626 is the largest national herd, and South Africa rates its own elephants Least Concern. East Africa lost 62% of its elephants to poaching between 2006 and 2013, and Somalia lost them all. Ethiopia fell from 6,000 to 10,000 in the 1970s to about 1,900 to 2,151 in 2015. The IUCN lists the species as extinct in Burundi, the Gambia and Mauritania.

Both African elephants have sat on CITES Appendix I since 1989, which bans international trade in ivory. Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe moved to Appendix II in 1997, and South Africa in 2000. The African Elephant Database, started in 1986, pools aerial surveys, dung counts and poaching data. Community programmes have eased conflict, and playing recorded bee sounds drives elephants away from villages. Where herds grow too large, as in Kruger, managers now use contraception and relocation rather than culling.

Relationship with humans

Ivory has drawn people to elephants for thousands of years, and the tusks remain the most valued part of the animal. Ivory went into billiard balls, dice, piano keys, stamps and carvings. The trade was banned in 1989, but the illegal trade doubled between 2007 and 2014. In June 2002 a container seized in Singapore held more than 6.5 tonnes of ivory, including 42,120 stamp blanks and 532 tusks.

Elephants raid crops, and a raiding elephant that is chased may turn and kill the farmer. Villagers often kill elephants that enter fields, so conflict adds to the losses from poaching. Poachers sometimes poison carcasses to kill the vultures that would give them away. In June 2019 in Botswana, 537 vultures and two eagles died on three poisoned elephant carcasses.

Trophy hunting is legal in several southern African countries and brings in money, but it removes the old bulls herds rely on. Elephants are the biggest draw for safari tourism in East and southern Africa. In zoos, cows are kept in groups and bulls apart, because bulls are costly and dangerous to house. It appears the African elephant has never been domesticated on any scale, unlike its Asian cousin.

In culture and myth

People painted elephants on rock long before they wrote. A carving at Tadrart Acacus in Libya dates from 12,000 to 8000 BC and shows the animal with striking realism. San painters left a white elephant in Phillip's Cave in Namibia and many elephant images in the Cederberg of South Africa.

In Maasai tradition the elephant is Arkanjowe, a great and powerful being, and is regarded as close to human. A Maasai legend says the first elephant was a bride who turned back on the way to her husband's home. Southern and East African tales explain the trunk as a nose stretched at a riverbank, usually by a crocodile. Across Africa, royal emblems, totems, proverbs and masks use the elephant to mean power, memory and leadership.

Some famous beliefs are false. Elephants are not afraid of mice, and they have no special love of peanuts. They do not drink through the trunk like a straw, but suck water part way up and squirt it into the mouth. The saying that an elephant never forgets probably grew from the matriarch's long memory of water sources in drought.