LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Elephant: African Elephant
built 675 days ago
When AWF chose the elephant as its logo over 45 years ago, the elephant's survival was not a subject of great concern. Today, it is difficult for elephants to live outside protected parks as they are pressured by poachers and by the habitat loss that comes with increasing human settlement. For more than 45 years, AWF has been involved with elephant research in eastern and southern Africa, developing management strategies to minimize human-elephant conflict. Elephants are an essential component of African ecosystems, but when they are confined by park boundaries and human settlements, their impact can upset the ecological balance. Thus, the identification and protection of migration corridors and dispersal areas outside of parks is critical.
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Most commercial ivory comes from elephant's tusks. From 1979 to 1989 was a bad time for African elephants. About 70,000 wild elephants were killed for ivory each year. In 1989 an international treaty limited the trade in ivory, decreasing the number of elephants killed, but elephants are still being killed for ivory. Please don't ever buy anything made from ivory! Don't even buy anything that looks like ivory!
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The African elephant is the largest living land mammal. Of all its specialized features, the muscular trunk is perhaps the most extraordinary. It serves as a nose, hand, extra foot, signaling device and tool for gathering food, siphoning water, dusting, and digging. The tusks are another notable feature of both males and females. Elephants are right or left-tusked, using the favored tusk more often... shortening it from constant wear. Tusks differ in size, shape and angle and researchers can use them to identify individuals.
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By Dr Paul Matschie several races of the African elephant have been described, mainly, as already mentioned, on certain differences in the shape of the ear. From the two West African races (E. a. cyclotis and a. oxyotis) the dwarf Congo elephant is stated to be distinguished by the shape of its ear; comparison in at least one instance having been made with an immature animal. The relatively small size of the ear is one of the most distinctive characteristics of the dwarf race. Further, the skin is stated to be much less rough, with fewer cracks, while a more important difference occurs in the trunk, which lacks the transverse ridges so distinctive of the ordinary African elephant, and thereby approximates to the Asiatic species.
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Donna, a 21-year-old African elephant, watches over her calf, Nadirah, 30 hours after birth. Donna and the calf are bonding and should be introduced to the rest of the herd sometime in the next few weeks. Nadirah, which is an African name for precious and rare, was born early Monday morning after only 16 minutes of labor and weighed a healthy 233 pounds. Soon, guests at Disney's Animal Kingdom will be able to see Nadirah's progress on camera monitors at Rafiki's Planet Watch.
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It may be added that fossil remains of the African elephant have been obtained from Spain, Sicily, Algeria and Egypt, in strata of the Pleistocene age. Some of the main differences in the habits of the African as distinct from those of the Asiatic elephant have been mentioned under the heading of the latter species. The most important of these are the greater tolerance by the African animal of sunlight, and the hard nature of its food, which consists chiefly of boughs and roots. The latter are dug up with the tusks; the left one being generally employed in this service, and ... becoming much more worn than its fellow. (R. L.*)
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African Elephant