This trunk has two lips on the end that allow it to very carefully grasp items. "Age, musth, and paternity success in wild male African elephants, "The exploitation of elephants for the ivory trade: an historical perspective", "How many elephants are killed for the ivory trade? Around 40 to 60 years of age, the elephant loses the last of its molars and will likely die of starvation, a common cause of death. [6] In 1936, Glover Morrill Allen considered this elephant to be a distinct species and called it 'forest elephant';[7] later authors considered it to be a subspecies. Until recently, scientists thought they were the same species. How does the African elephant interact with people? By age 25, males are double the weight of females; however, both sexes continue to grow throughout their lives. [80] Many societies believed that their chiefs would be reincarnated as elephants. The largest recorded individual stood 3.96 metres (13.0 ft) at the shoulder, and is estimated to have weighed 10,400 kg (22,900 lb). According to the Wikipedia resource, the total number of the African bush elephants today is more than 15,000 individuals. Forest elephants make up about one-third to one-quarter of the total elephant population in Africa. Male elephants can also smell the hormones of a female ready for breeding. This listing banned international trade of African elephants and their body parts by countries that signed the CITES agreement. African savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana) are found in eastern, central and southern Africa, living in lowland and montane forests, flood plains, and all types of woodland and savanna. In Greek linguistics, elephos represents an antlered beast or stag. Also known as “ecosystem engineers,” elephants shape their habitat in many ways. Formerly described as two subspecies of Loxodonta africana (Maisels et al. They have extremely large ears and both the males and the females grow tusks. African elephant classification is ongoing research. Genus comprising two living elephant species, Guezo and Glele ruled from 1818 to 1858 and from 1858 to 1889, respectively, Vira, Varun and Ewing, Thomas (April 2014), International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, West African Elephant Memorandum of Understanding, Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, "Analytical Notices of Books. [82] The elephant is symbolically important to the nation of Ivory Coast (Côte d'Ivoire); the Coat of arms of Ivory Coast features an elephant head escutcheon as its focal point. The Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals provided financial support for four years to implement the West African Elephant Conservation Strategy, which forms the central component of this intergovernmental treaty. [60] Fossil remains of Loxodonta species have been excavated in Africa, dating to the Middle Pliocene. The African elephant (Loxodonta) is a genus comprising two living elephant species, the African bush elephant (L. africana) and the smaller African forest elephant (L. cyclotis). [30] It is the third largest terrestrial animal. The smaller African forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) inhabit the Congo basin and western Africa in moist, semi-deciduous rainforests. Currently, this species is classified as Vulnerable (VU) on the IUCN Red List, and its numbers are increasing. [62], When the international ivory trade reopened in 2006, the demand and price for ivory increased in Asia. Why is the skin on elephants so weird looking. – Guide to African Elephants What is the classification of the African Elephant? [60] It is characterized by its highly dexterous trunk, long curved tusks, and massive ears. [57] Most observed matings are by males in musth over 35 years of age. Well organized networks facilitated smuggling the ivory through Sudan. As the front pair wears down and drops out in pieces, the back pair moves forward, and two new molars emerge in the back of the mouth. After puberty, male elephants tend to form close alliances with other males. [54] Females choose to a point who they mate with, since they are the ones who try to get males to compete to guard them. The word ‘elephant’ has both Greek and Latin origins. The trunk is a prehensile elongation of its upper lip and nose. During the middle of estrus, female elephants look for males in musth to guard them. "Living African elephants belong to two species: "Genetic Evidence for Two Species of Elephant in Africa", "Proboscidean Mitogenomics: Chronology and Mode of Elephant Evolution Using Mastodon as Outgroup", "Genomic DNA sequences from mastodon and woolly mammoth reveal deep speciation of forest and savanna elephants", "Reconciling Apparent Conflicts between Mitochondrial and Nuclear Phylogenies in African Elephants", "The Ears as a Race-Character in the African Elephant", "Four new species of Elephantidae from the Plio-Pleistocene of northwestern Kenya", "Cytonuclear genomic dissociation in African elephant species", "Palaeogenomes of Eurasian straight-tusked elephants challenge the current view of elephant evolution", "General information on elephants with emphasis on tusks", "25 Things You Might Not Know About Elephants", "Shoulder height, body mass and shape of proboscideans", "Forest elephant videos, photos and facts – Loxodonta cyclotis", "Secrets of male elephant society revealed in the wild", "The maximum attainable body size of herbivorous mammals: morphophysiological constraints on foregut, and adaptations of hindgut fermenters", "Selective feeding by a megaherbivore, the African elephant ( Loxodonta africana )", "Phylogenomic analyses reveal convergent patterns of adaptive evolution in elephant and human ancestries", "Elephants know when they need assistance in a cooperative task", "In Africa, Decoding the 'Language' of Elephants", "Elephants Outwit Humans During Intelligence Test". The gestation period of an elephant is 22 months and fertile females usually give birth every 3–6 years, so if they live to around 50 years of age, they may produce 7 offspring. African bush elephant, Loxodonta africana North African elephant, Loxodonta africana pharaoensis (extinct). A single family group of elephants was followed to record group behaviours and vocalizations from January through August 2001. The African forest elephant was found to have a high degree of genetic diversity, perhaps reflecting periodic fragmentation of their habitat during the climatic changes in the Pleistocene. Livraison 52 et 53", "Geographische Abarten des Afrikanischen Elefanten". New research suggests that bulls maintain ecological knowledge for the herd, facilitating survival when searching for food and water, which also benefits the young bulls who associate with them. The African savanna, or bush, elephant (Loxodonta africana) weighs up to 8,000 kg (9 tons) and stands 3 to 4 metres (10 to 13 feet) at the shoulder.The African forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis), which lives in rainforests, was recognized as a separate species in 2000 and is smaller than the savanna elephant.It has slender, downward-pointing tusks. Loxodonte was proposed as generic name for the African elephant by Frédéric Cuvier in 1825. [20], Sequence analysis of DNA from fossils of the extinct Eurasian Palaeoloxodon antiquus shows it to be much closer related to the African forest elephant than to the African bush elephant. Do African elephants have a hole in their brain? Elephants are herbivores, and will eat a wide variety of vegetation. Interview of African Elephants Researcher Tim. [8][9][2] Morphological and genetic analyses provided evidence for species-level differences between the African bush elephant and the African forest elephant. [58] African Bush Elephant Classification and Evolution The African Bush Elephant is the largest of all living creatures on land today, with some individuals growing to weigh more than 6 tonnes. Males over the age of 25 compete strongly for females in estrus, and are more successful the larger and more aggressive they are. Less than a third of the population of female elephants will be in estrus at any given time and gestation period of an elephant is long, so it makes more evolutionary sense for a male to search for as many females as possible rather than stay with one group. However, conservative estimates were that 23,000 African elephants were killed by poachers in 2013[62] and less than 20% of the African elephant range was under formal protection. [34], When separate family units bond, they form kinship or bond groups. The government of Tanzania estimated that more than 85,000 elephants were lost to poaching in Tanzania between 2009 and 2014, representing a 60% loss. 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