The Indian elephant is the second largest animal on land, would you have ever said? Yet the males are in fact on average five and a half to six and a half meters long with a shoulder height of almost three meters. Just to get an idea, consider that they weigh between 3900 and 4700 kilograms . The females are slightly smaller but they certainly cannot be called small animals. We cannot ignore such a “bulky” animal, it is necessary to dedicate an article to it and I do so with pleasure.
Indian Elephant: Meaning
Rather than Indian elephant, we usually speak of Asian elephant, known in scientific jargon as Elephas maximus . It is a mammal of the Elephantidae family , in fact today it is the only survivor of the order of proboscideans. Even if it is officially called Asian, today we often speak of “Indian” but in truth the Indian one would be only one subspecies of the many that exist today and of which in total there are about 100 thousand specimens in the world. Currently, four living subspecies of Elephas are known while two others are extinct.
The living ones are the Elephas maximus maximus , called the Ceylon Elephant, the Elephas maximus borneensis , called the Bornean Elephant, the Elephas maximus indicus, called the Indian Elephant , and the Elephas maximus sumatranus, called the Sumatran Elephant . The two extinct subspecies are the Elephas maximus rubridens, which lived in northern China until 1400 BC, and the Elephas maximus asurus, called the Syrian Elephant.
Indian Elephant: Characteristics
To tell the story of the elephant, it is good to understand how it differs from the African one, precisely to understand why it is necessary to always specify which of the two we are talking about. The Indian one has an overall structure similar to that of the African elephant , so let’s not imagine two different animals, but certainly of different dimensions, especially as regards the male specimens, smaller if Indian, while the females of the two species have a similar size.
There are differences in the shape of the skull, the Indian one shows two prominences and an internal saddle, and differences in the ears, smaller. The African elephant has a saddle back and a rump higher than the withers while the Indian has it convex and descending from the withers to the rump. The tusks are also different, the Indian elephant has smaller ones, in general, and sometimes the females have only hints of them, almost difficult to notice. If we look at the legs of the elephants we can notice that the Indian has four hooves on the hind foot, against the three of the African species.
If we look at the head, we notice that the Asian elephant ‘s jaw has a sort of pendulous and pointed lip at the end, which is missing in the African elephant.
Indian Elephant: What Does It Eat?
While it roams in herds of a couple of dozen individuals, the Indian elephant feeds mainly on grasses and shoots, in rarer cases also on fruits and bark. Given its size and its energy needs, it practically spends the whole day looking for food to ingest about 150 kg of fruit and leaves every day.
The social life of these elephants is not as lively as you might imagine, as they are always busy getting something to eat. The adult males in the wild are solitary, while the females and the younger males move in groups. They are not frequent but there are periods dedicated to reproduction and gestation, as you might imagine, is very long, it can even last 22 months and at the end only one baby elephant is born.
Since they are little these animals love water, spraying it on themselves with their trunks to take refreshing baths and in fact they tend to live where there are bodies of water, in jungles and prairies even if in some cases we also find them in the mountains.