What kind of elephants have tusks

In fact, the scientists found the age of the matriarch to be a significant predictor of the number of calves produced by the family per female reproductive year. These findings present important implications for conservation of elephants because older, larger animals are more likely to be targets for hunters and poachers, and killing these individuals could weaken entire family units for years.

An elephant can live up to 70 years and when an elephant dies of old age the cause of death is often hunger as the 6th set of molars wears out. There are two subspecies of the African elephant, the forest elephant Loxodonta africana cyclotis and the savanna elephant Loxodonta a. There is some evidence to suggest that these may in fact be two different species but this issue is still being debated. The African forest elephant can be distinguished from the savanna elephant by its smaller body size, smaller ears, and its straighter, downward - projecting tusks.

Most of the forest elephants live in central and western Africa's rain forests while the savanna elephant is found throughout the grassy plains, woodlands, swamps and bushlands from sea level to high mountains. SSC Groups. Photo: Esther Birchmeier.

Q: What are the closest relatives of elephants? Q: Do all elephants have tusks? Q: I heard that elephants can regrow their tusks - is it true? Q: What does an elephant use its tusks for? Q:What is the full purpose of the elephant's trunk? Q: Why does an African elephant have such large ears? Q: Why is an elephant's skin so wrinkled?

Q: How much do elephants drink in a day? Q: How much do elephants eat in a day? What does their diet consist of? Q: How many hours do elephants sleep? Elephants normally sleep for a few hours before dawn and again during the heat of the day. Q: Do elephants have distinct calving seasons? Q: How many young do elephants have? Q: How big are newborn elephants? Q: How big do elephants grow? Q: How big are elephant home ranges? Q: Are elephants territorial? Q: How do elephants communicate with each other?

Q: Is it true that an elephant never forgets? Studies are underway to determine whether that is the case. The good news, however, is that when protected and given space to roam, elephant populations can flourish.

There are many excellent conservation projects across Africa and Asia working hard to ensure that elephants — and their tusks — are a part of the natural world for many years to come. Indeed, by greatly reducing the number of elephants killed for their ivory, we can protect remaining populations, and potentially halt, or even reverse, the decline in tusk size. Who knows, maybe there is a young elephant in Africa who is destined to one day rival Ahmed and his mighty tusks. Interestingly, elephants and humans both have hair.

In fact, all mammals have hair at some point in their lives , even whales and dolphins. It is just present in differing amounts, which generally depends on how useful it is to the animal for keeping warm. Elephants for example, have a very sparse covering of wiry hair across their bodies, which is only noticeable from very close up. Compare this to sea otters, which have some of the most densely packed hair in the mammal world: , hairs per sq cm.

The human head , by comparison, has between hairs per sq cm. Recent figures suggest that about a third of younger females—the generation born after the war ended in —never developed tusks. Normally, tusklessness would occur only in about 2 to 4 percent of female African elephants. But those numbers dwindled to triple digits following the civil war.

And 32 percent of the female elephants born since the war are tuskless. Other countries with a history of substantial ivory poaching also see similar shifts among female survivors and their daughters. In South Africa, the effect has been particularly extreme—fully 98 percent of the females in Addo Elephant National Park were reportedly tuskless in the early s. Josephine Smit, who studies elephant behavior as a researcher with the Southern Tanzania Elephant Program, says that among the female elephants she tracks at Ruaha National Park, an area that was heavily poached in the s and s, 21 percent of females older than five are tuskless.

As in Gorongosa, the numbers are highest among older females. About 35 percent of females older than 25 are tuskless, she says.

And among elephants ages five to 25, 13 percent of females are tuskless. Smit, a doctoral candidate at the University of Stirling, in Scotland, says the data have not yet been published, though she presented the findings at a scientific wildlife conference last December. Poaching has also pushed tusk sizes down in some heavily hunted areas, such as southern Kenya.

A study conducted by Duke University and the Kenya Wildlife Service compared the tusks of elephants captured there between and with those of elephants culled between and that is, before significant poaching took place in the late s and early s and found significant differences. Survivors of that period of intense poaching had much smaller tusks—they were about a fifth smaller in males and more than a third smaller in females.

The pattern repeated in their offspring. On average, male elephants born after had tusks 21 percent smaller than the males from the s, and 27 percent smaller than the females from that period. Despite the wave of human-influenced tusklessness in recent decades, elephants missing their tusks are surviving and appear healthy, according to Poole.

A elephant conservation plan in Uganda reported a higher-than-normal percentage of tuskless elephants in Queen Elizabeth National Park and singled out poaching as the main cause. Whereas a normal level of tusklessness in an elephant population is somewhere between 3 percent and 4 percent, according to the Ugandan report, a survey of Queen Elizabeth National Park revealed tusklessness in the elephant population to be between 9 percent and 25 percent.

For African elephants, tuskless males have a much harder time breeding and do not pass on their genes as often as tusked males. In heavily poached populations, says Poole, the ratio of tuskless animals in the population increases as poaching continues.

You can see this in almost any population that has experienced a wave of heavy poaching, in Gorongosa [in Mozambique], for example, or Selous [in Tanzania]. One might go a step further and contend that wiping out elephants—be they big tuskers or not—amounts to ecological sabotage as well. Elephants perform an important role in the ecosystem, as landscape architects—pushing down trees, establishing trails, and creating new patches of grassland for other wildlife—and as biotic agents that disperse seeds long distances through dense forests and across the savanna.

It boils down to this: stop the killing, stop the trafficking, and stop the demand. In other words, stop the poachers on the ground with more anti-poaching patrols, increased security around protected areas, and strong judicial action against convicted poachers and traffickers.

Stop wildlife traffickers in their tracks with improved security at ports of entry, better training of customs and border agents, and increased law enforcement coordination between countries. And stop the demand with very visible, very targeted, and very large public awareness campaigns in consumer nations, especially in Asia, where the greatest demand for ivory stems.