Classification of elephant subspecies and their characteristics

Elephant Subspecies

There is a saying that an elephant never forgets. With the quantity of brain mass they contain within their gargantuan heads, this saying cannot be far from the truth; elephants truly are quite intelligent mammals. This brain capacity is perhaps quite evident in the modern elephant's ancestry, where millions of years ago, the leviathan mammoths roamed the earth. These days, however, there barely any room for such creatures to live. Still, the remaining elephant species can be found roaming the vast lands of Africa and Asia. In fact, two of them -- the African Bush Elephant and the Indian Elephant -- are perhaps the closest in ancestry to the mammoth and most prominent of the elephant subspecies located around the Eastern hemisphere.

The African Bush Elephant (sometimes called the African Elephant or African Savanna Elephant), Loxodonta africana, is the larger of two African subspecies of elephants. Like its smaller sister subspecies the African Forest Elephant, Loxodonta africana cyclotis, the African Bush Elephant is known for its large ears, immense, muscular trunks, and well-developed ivory tusks. Both female and male Bush Elephants possess the tusks, which are prized by poachers and hunters within the African wilderness. This hunting for ivory tusks and the elephants' thick hides might be the most major of the threats to the African Bush Elephant; as for predators, well, it would take something much bigger than an elephant to take on a fully-grown Bush Elephant. The African Bush Elephant has been said to communicate through sound and seismic vibrations, oftentimes females in heat exude a particular noise that can travel from miles around, enabling solitary males into approaching them for mating. Bush Elephants tend to live and feed upon foliage within forests, semi-deserts, and grasslands.

The Indian Elephant, Elephas maximus indicus, is one of three recognized subspecies of Asian elephants. Like their African relatives, the female Indian Elephants travel in herds with their young; leading them is an older female elephant, or a matriarch. Most of the time the grown males break apart and form their own herds, or they wander solitarily in the wilderness. The strong, alpha male tends to win the right to mate with a particular female, though it has been said that these elephants are not at all territorial. Indian Elephants are much different in physique to their African relatives with regards to their smaller ears, broader skulls, and larger trunks. As far as tusks also go, the females tend to have underdeveloped -- or short -- tusks, or have no tusks at all. Additionally, Indian Elephants are much smaller, ranging from 4,000 to 11,000 lb. As opposed to the Bush Elephants' range of 13,000 to 20,000 lb. Indian Elephants also feed on grass, though their diet mostly depends on their environment. For the most part, Indian Elephants can be found within Asia's grasslands, moist and dry deciduous forests, as well as semi-evergreen and evergreen forests.