Sarah L. Thomson - Save The...Elephants

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Blue Whales

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Elephants

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Frogs

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Whale Sharks

An elephant isnt hard to spot. Its the biggest animal that lives on land. If youre going to look for one, youd better head to the grasslands or forests of Africa or to the jungles of Southeast Asia.Youll find a different kind, or species, of elephant in each place.

Once there were elephants in all of Africa south of the Sahara. Today elephants live in only thirty-seven of Africas fifty-four countries, as far north as Mali and as far south as the nation of South Africa. Elephant habitats, or the places they can safely live, have shrunk in half over the last forty years.

You can tell an African elephant by its flapping earsthey are shaped a little like the continent of Africa itself. And if you get close enough to peer at its trunk, youll see that the African elephant has two flexible parts on the end. It can use these just like you use a finger and a thumbto pick up something small.

African savanna elephants are the biggest elephants around. Theyre also called bush elephants, and they can be ten or even thirteen feet tall at the shoulder, and their heads are higher still! The biggest ones weigh around seven tons. Thats about as much as three pickup trucks.

African forest elephants are a little smaller. They weigh about five and a half tons, a little more than two pickup trucks.

Being about the same weight as a Tyrannosaurus rex has some advantages for an animal like an elephant. There arent many predators who want to tackle a seven-ton animal. At a water hole or a lake, other animals make way. If the elephant spots some leaves at the very top of a tree that would be out of reach for most? No problemit can stretch its trunk and snatch those leaves up.

Food that is out of reach for many animals is easy for elephants to grab.

But there is one problem with being so big. Elephants need to eat a lot, around 300 pounds of food a day. (If you had an elephants appetite, you could eat about 330 apples for breakfast, 400 hot dogs for lunch, and 400 plates of spaghetti for dinnerand then do that all again the next day.) Eating is pretty much an elephants full-time job. It can spend sixteen hours a day munching food.

So the right habitat for an elephant must have a lot of food available. What kind of food? Plants. Elephants are herbivores. They do not eat meat.

To get enough food, elephants need to live somewhere warm where plants can grow all year round. The best habitat for an elephant is around ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit most of the time.

An African forest elephant spends its time in rain forests, eating leaves, fruits, seeds, branches, and bark. The forest trees and bushes provide all the food that this elephant needs.

An African savanna elephant eats grass, leaves, bark, and sometimes even trees that arent too big. Theyll eat fruit, flowers, and nuts as well. These elephants may live in forests, and they can also be found in deserts. (Even in a desert, elephants can find enough food. Desert elephants often prefer to eat grass during the rainy season and trees when its dry.)

Many savanna elephants live on wide, grassy plains calledyou guessed itsavannas. There they wander, sometimes for hundreds of miles a year, eating as they go.