How African Savanna Elephants Differ from African Forest Elephants
How African Savanna Elephants Differ from African Forest Elephants: An elephant is considered the largest land mammal on earth, and Africa is one of the few continents that is gifted with the majestic elephants that live in Africa’s tropical rain forests and others roaming the savannah grasslands.
Originally, the world had only two species of elephants: the Asian elephant and the African elephant, but research shows that there are three elephant species in the world, and these include the African savanna elephant, the African forest elephant, and the Asian elephant.
These elephants belong to the family Elephantidae, where the African elephant is scientifically known as Loxondonta africana. They have a life span of 50-60 years, and this is due to the fact that an elephant has 6 sets of teeth, and each set lasts for 10 years, then wears out.
Aged elephants die of natural causes because at such age they can no longer feed and therefore resort to water and soft materials, which don’t match with their standard megaherbivore diet. This is because they consume large quantities of food compared to any other mammal, with a daily intake ranging between 50 and 300 kilos of vegetation, and spend most of their time feeding on plants.
How African Savanna Elephants Differ from African Forest Elephants
Formerly, African elephants were considered as a single species, but later on, researchers discovered genetically that these two species were no more related and therefore should be related as distinctive species. Researchers reveal that this genetic evidence illustrates that these two species differed about millions of years ago, taking the tally to three.
Therefore, the identification of the African savannah elephants and African forest elephants as distinctive species has a fundamental impact in terms of sustainable tourism, majorly because most of these forest elephants reside in politically unstable countries of Central Africa. Scientifically, these species have a lot that differs between the savannah elephants and the forest elephants.
Many people have always encountered elephants, but they don’t pay attention to them in order to analyze their physical appearance and the features they possess that may vary from one species to another.
This is because most travellers prefer looking at their majestic body size, tusks, and how it plays with its trunk to execute several tasks. Below are some of the factors that illustrate how African savanna elephants differ from African forest elephants.
Savannah elephants are bigger in terms of size compared to the forest elephants, whose size is smaller, with 3.3 meters above the shoulder and 7.5 meters long. Forest elephants have an average weight that is between 4 and 6 tonnes compared to the African savanna elephant, which exceeds this weight.
Savannah elephants have wide, long, and protruding tusks that are used for protection and sourcing out food, especially for felling trees and also scooping the surface in search of water, among other things.
On the other hand, forest elephants have small and streamlined tusks that help these animals in traversing through the thick forest without getting clogged in tree stands.
Scientifically, the African savannah elephants are known as Loxondonta Africana, while the African forest elephants are scientifically referred to as Loxondota cyclotis, as proposed by scientists.
The African savannah elephants are mainly found in the protected areas of savannah plains of Africa, mainly in national parks, with the highest concentration located in countries such as Tanzania, Botswana, Zambia, Kenya, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Uganda.
On the other hand, forest elephants mainly seek refuge in the dense forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cameroon, and the Central African Republic, attributed to their dense tropical rain forests. However, inside these dense forests, forest elephants are subject to human threats emanating from political unrest, wars, poaching, mining, and construction, among others.
Research reveals the sample taken by NCI scientists to measure the genetic distinctive prowess of these two species, the African savannah elephants and the forest elephants, was not wide compared to the divergence between man and his close cousin, the chimpanzee, though it was as great as the differences of the big cats between lions and tigers.
However, these majestic land mammals need our intervention as part of sustainable tourism, especially in terms of habitat preservation, together with strict laws on man’s activities, particularly poaching, since many elephants have lost their lives due to man’s inhuman nature, particularly for their tusks.
