African Elephant

There is no such thing as the African elephant. There are two of them, and the difference matters enough that conservationists spent years arguing about it.

In 2021 the IUCN finally assessed them separately, and the result was stark. The savanna elephant is Endangered. The forest elephant is Critically Endangered. Counted together, as they had been for decades, the two averaged out into something that looked less urgent than the truth.

Between them they are the largest land animals alive, and about 415,000 remain. For general elephant biology, including the Asian species, start there. This page is about the two African ones.

• Kingdom: Animalia
• Phylum: Chordata
• Class: Mammalia
• Order: Proboscidea
• Family: Elephantidae
• Species: Loxodonta africana, the African bush or savanna elephant, described by Blumenbach in 1797
• Species: Loxodonta cyclotis, the African forest elephant, proposed by Matschie in 1900

Matschie suggested the forest elephant was its own species in 1900. It took genetic work a century later to settle that he was right, and the split was only formally recognized in recent decades.

The savanna elephant is the bigger animal by a wide margin.

• Savanna bulls: 10 to 11 ft (3.04 to 3.36 m) at the shoulder, 11,500 to 15,200 lb (5.2 to 6.9 metric tons)
• Savanna cows: 8 to 9 ft (2.47 to 2.73 m), 5,700 to 7,700 lb (2.6 to 3.5 metric tons)
• Forest males: about 7 to 7.5 ft (2.09 to 2.31 m), 3,700 to 5,100 lb (1.7 to 2.3 metric tons)
• The largest bull on record stood 13 ft (3.96 m) and was estimated at 10.4 metric tons

There is a quick way to tell the two apart beyond size, and it is the line of the back. A savanna elephant’s back dips in the middle, giving it a swayed, concave profile. A forest elephant’s back runs almost straight.

This is the question children ask most, and the reliable answer is not the ears.

• The trunk tip. An African elephant has two finger-like processes at the end of its trunk. An Asian elephant has one. This is the clearest difference there is
• Tusks. Both sexes grow them in African elephants. In Asian elephants, large tusks are mostly a male trait
• Size. The savanna elephant is the largest land animal on Earth, bigger than any Asian elephant
• Ears. African ears are large, and they work as radiators, dumping body heat through a dense network of blood vessels

You will often read that an African elephant’s ear is shaped like the continent of Africa. It is a handy memory trick, but the trunk tip is the thing to look at if you want to be right.

Tusks are teeth. A calf grows small milk tusks, called tushes, and replaces them at about a year old with the permanent pair, which then keep growing for the rest of its life. A big tusk reaches 5 to 8 feet (1.5 to 2.4 m) and weighs 50 to 100 pounds (23 to 45 kg).

They are working tools, not ornaments. An elephant digs for roots with them, strips bark off trees, fights other bulls and defends itself.

The trunk is the more remarkable structure. It is an extension of the upper lip and nose, it contains no bone at all, and it is operated by somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 muscles. For comparison, your whole body has about 600. It can lift roughly 3 percent of the elephant’s own body weight, and it is used for smelling, touching, feeding, drinking, throwing dust and, held above the surface, snorkeling in deep water.

African elephants are generalist herbivores, eating leaves, grasses, bark and fruit, and shifting toward woody plants in the dry season when grass gives out.

They digest it by hindgut fermentation, breaking plant matter down in the rear of the gut, which is an inefficient system but one that copes with enormous volume. The animal gets by on poor food by simply processing a great deal of it.

The family unit is a group of related cows with their daughters and their not-yet-grown sons, led by a matriarch, normally the oldest female. She decides where the herd goes and when, and in dry country that knowledge is the difference between water and no water.

Bulls leave. After puberty they form loose alliances with other males and return to the herds mainly to breed or socialize. Forest elephant groups hold together less tightly than savanna ones, which makes sense in thick forest where a large herd cannot easily stay in contact.

Gestation runs 22 months, nearly two years, which is the longest pregnancy of any land animal.

The numbers tell the story of the ivory trade better than adjectives can.

• Between 1976 and 1980, about 830 metric tons of raw ivory left Africa, which is the tusks of roughly 222,000 elephants
• Estimates fell from 1.34 million in 1976, to 760,000 in 1987, to 608,000 in 1989
• The trade was listed on CITES Appendix I in 1989, banning commercial international sale
• Poaching surged again from 2008 and peaked around 2011, with about 70 percent of ivory going to China
• Tanzania alone lost more than 85,000 elephants between 2009 and 2014, about 60 percent of its population

Forest elephants carry an extra burden. Their ivory is smaller but harder and easier to carve, which makes it more valuable on the black market, and that is part of why their decline has been so much steeper.

In Mozambique, during the civil war between 1977 and 1992, fighters on both sides killed around 90 percent of the elephants in what is now Gorongosa National Park, selling the ivory to fund the war.

Before the war, fewer than a fifth of the females were naturally tuskless. Among the survivors, half were. An elephant with no ivory was not worth shooting, so tusklessness stopped being a disadvantage and became the thing that kept you alive.

That change took about 15 years, which for natural selection in a long-lived animal is almost unbelievably fast.

The genetics are stranger still. Only females are ever tuskless, which pointed researchers to the X chromosome, and the variant appears to be dominant, so one copy is enough. The catch is what it does to sons. A male calf that inherits it seems not to survive early development at all. So a tuskless mother has mostly daughters, around two thirds of her calves, and about half of those daughters are tuskless like her.

The work was published in Science in 2021 by a team including Shane Campbell-Staton, Brian Arnold and Robert Pringle of Princeton, with Dominique Goncalves and Joyce Poole of ElephantVoices. It is one of the clearest cases ever documented of humans driving evolution in a large wild animal, inside a single human lifetime.

Since 2021 the two species are listed separately, and that is the whole point of the exercise.

• African savanna elephant: Endangered, after a decline of at least 60 percent over 50 years
• African forest elephant: Critically Endangered, after a decline of more than 86 percent in 31 years

Before the split, both were assessed together as Vulnerable. Averaging a shrinking forest population with a partly recovering savanna one produced a figure that described neither, and made some populations look safer than they were.

There is real good news in the detail. Several African countries have reversed their declines, and many savanna populations have begun to recover. Forest elephants have not, and they are the ones in the deepest trouble, squeezed by poaching and by rainforest being cleared for crops and grazing.

Which is the useful lesson in all of this. Two animals that look alike enough to have shared one name for a century are on completely different paths, and nobody could see that clearly until somebody insisted on counting them apart.