The African savanna elephant is the largest land animal alive, with bulls standing up to 13 feet at the shoulder. Herds are led by the oldest female, the matriarch, whose memory of distant water and old routes can decide whether a family survives a drought. As they feed, elephants push over trees, dig waterholes, and spread seeds, shaping the savanna for nearly every other species that lives there.
In 2021 the IUCN reassessed the species as Endangered. Poaching for ivory remains the central threat, alongside the steady conversion of rangeland to farmland and the conflict that follows when elephants and people compete for the same space. Populations are stable or growing in parts of southern Africa and falling sharply across parts of Central and West Africa.
The African savanna elephant is listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List primarily due to poaching for ivory and the loss of migratory habitat to agriculture and human settlement. Across eastern and southern Africa, conflict with farming communities and decades of illegal ivory trade have reduced populations by roughly 60 percent over the last fifty years, according to the IUCN.
African savanna elephants are herbivores that consume grasses, bark, roots, and fruit, eating several hundred pounds of vegetation daily to sustain their mass. They use their prehensile trunks to strip bark from acacia and baobab trees, and in dry seasons they dig with their tusks to expose underground roots and water sources.
African savanna elephants are the largest land animals on Earth, with bulls reaching up to 13 feet at the shoulder and weighing as much as 14,000 pounds. Their ears, shaped roughly like the African continent, can span six feet and function as radiators, pumping blood through thin skin to release heat in the savanna sun.
African savanna elephants range across sub-Saharan Africa, with significant populations in Botswana's Okavango Delta, Tanzania's Serengeti, Zimbabwe's Hwange National Park, and Kenya's Amboseli Basin. They favor open grasslands and woodland savannas but make seasonal movements of hundreds of miles following rainfall and the growth of fresh grazing.
African savanna elephants communicate partly through infrasound, producing rumbles below the threshold of human hearing that carry across several miles of open savanna. Research has shown they can also identify the calls of over 100 individual family members and distinguish the voices of different human ethnic groups associated with varying levels of threat.
Calves, which weigh roughly 200 pounds at birth after a 22-month gestation, are raised cooperatively by the entire matriarchal herd, with experienced females called allomothers helping guard, guide, and teach the young. Calves nurse for up to four years and remain dependent on their mothers for a decade, learning migration routes, water sources, and social behavior through close observation.
