Trunks entwined
- POSTED ON: 14 Feb, 2022
- TOTAL VIEWS: 259 Views
- POSTED BY: Sony BBC Earth | Article by Madhuvanti S. Krishnan
- ARTICLE POINTS: 150 Points
Elephants are the world’s largest land creatures, and also have one of the most distinctive appearances. They’re also the smartest and most sensitive animals on the planet. They have the largest brain of any land animal, with three times the number of neurons that humans have. While many of these are responsible for controlling the elephant’s huge and dexterous body, these animals have repeatedly proved their extraordinary mental capacities. Read on to know more and solve the image puzzles as you do…
It takes a herd to raise a baby elephant.
Did you know that the responsibility of taking care of the baby elephant belongs to the entire herd and not the mother alone? That’s a way of showing how elephants live a nice life of assisting one another. In fact, the entire herd goes around in search of food for the baby. Elephants need about 5% of their own body weight each day. They mostly eat grass, plants, bushes, fruits, tree bark, roots.
Appropriate use of tusks
Tusks are elongated incisors and are essentially no different from other teeth. An elephant uses its big tusks to dig deep down into the dry river bed and source water. Tusks are also used to aid foraging, digging, stripping bark and moving things out of the way and trained logging elephants are capable of even lifting large logs with their tusks.
Elephant’s role in the ecosystem
The presence of elephants means a healthy forest, as they play a vital role by helping plant trees. Wondering how? Well, Elephants are regarded as the primary seed disperser. So, majority of the plants or trees in forests must have probably been spread by elephants. When they move around the dung they drop helps in fertilizing the soil and that’s how new plants germinate.
Traits that elephants and humans have in common
Studies show that elephants can identify languages and can understand body language. They can distinguish differences in human gender, age, and ethnicity purely by the sound of someone’s voice. If the voice belongs to a person who is more likely to pose a threat, the elephants switch into defensive mode. Also, just like humans, elephants show empathy and mourn their dead. They caress the bones of the dead with their trunks and stand near the body of the deceased for hours. They also have extraordinary memories, sometimes better than human’s memory power.