Endangered Species: the Indian Elephant - Autre

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Appearance

For this paragraph, I will be telling you about the body of the Indian Elephant. The Indian Elephant’s height is around 13 feet/4 meters, but that is nothing compared to how much they weigh. Adult males weigh around 6300 (!) kg, while females weigh around 4500 kg (!) and baby elephants weigh around 90-120 kg!!!! They have a large pad at the bottom of their foot and a tissue on the heel. They have long tails that go beyond their knees. Elephants have uneven hair that is mostly noticeable around the eyes, ear openings, chin, and tail. Baby elephants have more hair that is reddish-brown but as they get older, they have less hair, and their hair becomes darker. That is what the body of the Indian Elephant looks like.

For this paragraph, I will be telling you about the system of the Indian Elephant’s body. They have VERY big heads on a very short neck. They also have humongous ears. In fact, the ears are SO huge that they take up 1/6 of the entire body! But these large ears are useful. They help the elephant’s cool down when it is incredibly warm. But the ears aren’t the only cooling devices the elephant has. Elephants have wrinkled skin that traps moisture in it, which helps the elephant to stay cool too. Now you know how the Indian Elephant’s body works.

Habitat

In this paragraph, I will be informing you about where the Indian Elephant lives. The Indian Elephant lives in India, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, The Malay Peninsula, Thailand, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Pakistan. They can be found in grasslands, tropical and evergreen forests, dry deciduous forests, wet deciduous forests, fields, dry thorn forests and secondary forests. They prefer to live here because they eat a lot of vegetation and these places have so much vegetation. They also live there because in moist forests, it is easy to get fresh water. The forests are beautiful, but sometimes the trees get knocked down because the elephants are so big! I definitely wouldn’t invite an elephant into my home!

Diet

Elephants are herbivores. That means that they rely on only vegetation for food. They can eat up to 150 kilograms of grass and plant a day! But that is good because, when they eat, they clear large areas that are full of vegetation, and those areas can make space for new vegetation to grow. The

Indian Elephant eats shrubs, grass, plants, and trees, so that means that they are both browsers and grazers. Browsers are animals that eat fruits of high growing plants and shrubs, while grazers are animals that eat grass, algae and other low lying plants. Elephants eat a lot but they only need to drink water once a day, and that is actually very impressive to the amount of food they have to eat. Sometimes, these elephants like to eat sugarcanes, rice, or bananas when they are near farming areas, but that isn’t a very good idea since farmers will get really mad at them! I understand that, but elephants are just looking for food. We really don’t have to be mad at them!

Life Cycle

In this paragraph, I will be telling you everything you need to know about an elephant’s life cycle. Female elephants will begin to give birth after 10-15 years. It takes 22 months to give birth to a baby elephant, while it takes 9 months to give birth to a human elephant. When a female elephant is giving birth, it will get protection from another female elephant in it’s family, so that she won’t get hurt. A female elephant gives birth to one baby elephant at a time, and it is very rare to have twins. Calves ( which are baby elephants) have to be nursed for their first 6 months. When elephants are born, their herd’s pace is adjusted so that the baby elephants can keep up. After a male elephant is 5 years old, it will leave it’s herd to live by itself while the female elephants stay. There are only 20,000-25,000 Indian Elephants in the world, so we should start giving notice to them by taking more care of them.

Reasons for being Endangered

The Indian Elephants are endangered because of a few reasons. The first reason is that their habitat is being destroyed. People are cutting down trees for wood, which is really making a dent in the population of the elephants since they won’t have any place to live. Their habitat is also being destroyed by natural disasters. The second reason that the Indian Elephants are going endangered is that poachers are hunting them down for their tusks. And a fact is, elephant tusks are really helpful for the environment and other animals, but when poachers kill them and take the tusks, the tusks are useless. The last (but not least) reason that the Indian Elephant is being endangered is because they eat the fruits that farmers grow and the farmers get mad because they need the fruits to feed the villagers. That is quite a few reasons for being endangered, and that is not good.

Why should we save these Gentle Giants

There are so many reasons why we should the Indian Elephants, or actually… all elephants! The first reason is that elephants use their tusks to dig for water when it is very dry and these water holes can be useful to both the elephants and other animals looking for water. The second reason we should is that when elephants leave waste (which they always do) it is full of seeds that are from plants they ate and that could be used for fertilizer for the plants and the seeds could make more plants/vegetation. The last (but again, not least) reason we should save the elephants is: some elephants are used to carry chopped down trees to make wood, but if there are no more elephants (which would be horrible) then who would carry the trees to the factories? That is why we should save elephants. There are many more reasons, but this is enough!

Fun Facts about Elephants

Since we learned so much about elephants, it’s time to do everyone’s favorite part of learning something: the fun facts! Did you know herds are made up of female elephants? The only male elephants in a herd are the young males, who are too young to go off on their own. Did you know elephants are too heavy and big to jump? And lastly, did you know male elephants are called bulls, female elephants are called cows and young elephants are called calves-just like cows! Well unfortunately that’s all. I hope you learned a lot about Indian Elephants, and I hope you are thinking about saving them, because I am (along with Vaquitas and the Sumatran Rhino and also the fish who have to suffer from plastic in the ocean).

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