"A majestic giant." "The elephant is by far the largest creature that walks the Earth." "A mountain of muscle endowed with an enormous brain." "The elephant has evolved over fifty-five million years." "But why has it grown so big?" "What can it do with such brain power?" "Could it be capable of thoughts, feelings?" "This is the elephant story." "One of the most dramatic sights in nature is when two super heavyweight elephant bulls square up for a fight." "They can weigh up to seven and a half tons, grow to thirteen feet at the shoulder and have tusks as long as ten and a half feet." "Everything about the elephant is large." "The kingdom of the elephants spans many hundreds of square miles." "Their families are big, often thirty strong." "They seem to be big- hearted, too, with a great capacity for loyalty and devotion." "Size is an elephant's greatest asset." "It has few natural enemies, and can reach a wider variety of food than any of the animals around it." "Today there are two species." "The African, which is larger and heavier, and the Asian, with its bumpy head and smaller ears." "This is Seri and these are her vital statistics." "She is twenty-eight years old and comes from Burma." "She stands eight feet six inches tall, three feet six inches wide" "and weighs in at over four tons." "Her skeleton has to support this great weight." "The key to its strength is in the arrangement of its leg bones." "Smaller mammals tend to stand with bent legs, while Seri's bones stack almost vertically to form a sturdy pillar." "Not only is this stance immensely strong, but it helps to explain the elephant's strange gait." "To carry her weight, Seri has to walk with a stiff posture." "At a walking pace, this looks elegant enough but when she speeds up, it is a different matter." "When other mammals run, they exploit the springiness of their bent legs." "But Seri cannot do this." "She simply speeds up her stiff legged walk" "It might look awkward, but the elephant can move faster than an Olympic sprinter." "At this speed, four tons of flesh create bone shattering courses, but Seri compensates for the lack of springiness in her legs." "Strange as it may seem, elephants walk on tiptoe." "The ankle bones rest on a great pad of spongy material which acts like a shock absorber." "This also explains how such a large animal can move so quietly." "The foot smothers any object beneath it, muffling noises such as the cracking of a stick" "Even in swamps, the design of their feet means that they can move around without getting stuck" "Their feet splay out, acting like snowshoes, preventing them from sinking in too deep." "Elephants have evolved to live in very different conditions, from the coldest of mountains to the hottest of deserts." "Most warm-blooded animals have to maintain their bodies within a very narrow heat range, but elephants can withstand far greater changes in their body temperature." "Elephants tend to live in hot places and have evolved a number of mechanisms to keep cool." "One way is to have an organ that is several sizes too big for its body." "Heat is lost through the skin." "The more wrinkled it is, the greater its surface area, the cooler the elephant." "Wallowing may look like pure enjoyment, but it serves a vital purpose." "Water and mud alone can cool the elephant, but the wrinkles act to prolong the effect." "Mud trapped in the folds stays moist when the elephant is back out in the hot sun." "As the water evaporates from the skin, it cools the elephant much as evaporating sweat cools us." "A final powdering with talc of the" "Savanna and the ablutions are complete." "But this way of cooling is not powerful enough on its own." "Another strategy has to be employed." "A heat sensitive camera shows in red the areas of Seri's body that radiate the most heat." "Her ears act like the radiators of a car." "The ears are laced with blood vessels which Seri can dilate and constrict at will, giving her very accurate control over the flow of blood into her ears." "As she heats up, she opens more and more vessels." "The blood is cooled as it flows through the ear paper-thin skin." "The process is speeded up by flapping the ear, forcing a stream of cooling air across its surface." "All the blood in an elephant, one hundred gallons worth, can be pumped through the ears in twenty minutes." "The cooled blood is mixed back into the main system, cooling the whole body and preventing the brain from overheating." "African elephants are exposed to longer periods of sun than Asian elephants and have larger radiators." "Heat is also generated internally by processes like digestion." "A feeding elephant produces enough to heat a small house." "Elephants spend as much as three-quarters of their lives feeding." "Such an appetite can literally change the world they live in." "In their pursuit of food, these eating machines transform their environment more than any other creature, except humans." "In the space of a few years, forests can be turned into grasslands, and small mud pools transformed into large swamps." "In all, up to fifty tons of its environment will be digested by each elephant each year." "But all that chewing takes a heavy toll on the teeth." "As they wear down, the teeth move forward slowly and snap off piece by piece as they get to the front of the mouth." "At the back meanwhile, new teeth are erupting and shifting forward." "These teeth are massive, some weighing as much as twelve pounds." "The last tooth wears out when the elephant is in its sixties." "Unable to feed, it soon dies." "For an animal that eats so much, its digestive system is surprisingly ineffiicient." "Seri digests less than half of what she eats." "Elephants, like other herbivores, are unable to digest the main components of plants, the tough, fibrous cellulose." "Instead, this largest of creatures relies on the help of some of the smallest." "A teeming population of microbes in the gut digests the material for them." "Baby elephants are not born with these microbes, and so have to get them from somewhere else." "The best source of microbes is mother's dung." "And there is only one way to get them." "One by-product of this digestive process is an enormous quantity of methane gas." "On an average day an elephant expels enough gas to send an automobile twenty miles." "The most distinctive feature of elephants is also the most versatile in nature." "The trunk is telescopic and can reach branches up to twenty feet high, as well as food on the ground." "It enables the elephant to eat more species of plants than most of the other animals in its habitat." "It is a powerful cycle capable of drawing fifty-six gallons of water in four and a half minutes." "The trunk is immensely strong." "It can clean lift four hundred and fifty pounds, can help drag and push much more." "Yet, it is also incredibly sensitive." "The elephant has a keener sense of smell than a dog." "And the trunk is as dexterous as a human hand." "Yet the elephant is not born with an innate mastery of this sophisticated instrument." "That takes years of practice." "The story of how this bizarre limb evolved began over fifty-five million years ago with the elephant's earliest ancestors." "These primitive creatures were short-legged and about the size of a pig." "They probably had a mobile snout formed from the upper lip and nose which they used to gather food." "Over time, new generations of these animals increased dramatically in size." "As they became taller, their lower jaws also increased in length, maintaining contact with the ground for feeding." "The snout, now looking slightly more trunk-like, got bigger, too." "Their heads, now adorned with bigger tusks, got much heavier." "Their necks became shorter and stiffer, supporting the greater weight." "This trend continued for tens of millions of years." "The animals grew taller, and the jaw and trunk grew longer." "Then about twenty million years ago, the lowerjaw began to shrink, but the trunk still remained in contact with the ground." "Result is the appendage now used by the modern elephant." "For centuries scientists have known that, unlike the limb of any other mammal, the trunk contains no bones, just muscle, hence its flexibility." "Until recently... its precise workings have remained a mystery." "Oh, yes." "Look at that." "Dr. Jehese Shoshani spent months dissecting a trunk and is the first to disentangle the full complexity of its muscle system." "Oh!" "Now we can see these radiating muscles in here." "His startling conclusion is that it contains over one hundred fifty thousand separate muscle units, far more than an adult human arm." "...posterior to anterior." "Ah, with him, one, two, three..." "Hence, the trunk's great versatility." "Oh, this is beautiful!" "This is beautiful!" "Shoshani's obsession with elephants extends to his choice of pet, a hyrax, named Chiffon." "The hyrax is the elephant's closest living land relative." "As the examination did not end with the trunk, he has devoted the last fifteen years to dissecting the rest of the elephant." "No one before him has done this systematically." "A sheer scale of the job is daunting." "At times, the dissector scalpel has to give way to the chain saw." "One final organ remains to go under Shoshani blade, and one question may yet be answered." "Is it true that elephants never forget?" "Look at the size of this brain." "Oh, wow!" "Shoshani has waited a long time for this moment." "He is about to dissect his first elephant brain with his collaborator, Professor" "Nick Mozares, an expert in the human brain." "Here we go." "Shoshani can hardly contain his excitement." "Nick, this is a beautiful job!" "O.K. Go ahead." "See it is tougher than the human brain." "Oh, look at that inside!" "Oh, whoa!" "Watch your fingers!" "Whoa!" "I can see the countless colors." "I can see the same." "Oh, yeah, yeah!" "Look at that!" "Okay." "Let me just do this last part." "Just give me the pleasure of doing something, please!" "Ah!" "That is why he called." "Ah!" "Look at that!" "Look at this." "Please, now describe what you are seeing, Nick" "There is the pituitary..." "They are anxious to compare the elephant's brain to a human brain." "Of particular interest are the structures involved in memory, the temporal lobes." "We are comparing the temporal lobes on the brain of an elephant, and this is the temporal lobe right in here, to that of the human on that side." "And this is the temporal lobe, right in here." "Is one major difference that I can see, and I am sure Nick would agree with me is, even though I read a lot about the size of the temporal lobe, once you see it, you just realize in" "third dimension how enormous it is." "It is very large." "And even with a naked eye, one can notice that the convolutions on human are less that, that that on a elephant." "The number of wiggly convolutions on the surface of the lobe indicates the capacity for information storage." "Significantly, the elephant's temporal lobes appear to be even more convoluted than those of the human." "Having looked on the brain of an elephant and the human, in comparing certain structure, especially the temporal lobes," "I would come to a general conclusion that overall the elephants have the capacity to be able to remember, recognize better than the human being can." "I believe there is some truth to the statement that elephants can never forget." "Yes, I believe that." "But what could elephants be using such a good memory for?" "One use is for the power of recognition." "Elephants can differentiate between up to two hundred individuals." "Good memory is essential because the females depend on each other in the rearing of their young to an extent that is very rare among mammals." "A mother needs to be able to remember and know who are the tried and trusted helpers." "Memory is the cement of elephant society holding these complex bonds in place." "Researchers know and have named each of the two hundred elephants that roam through this part of Africa." "Lan Douglas Hamilton is the pioneer of the study of elephant behavior in the wild." "He has learned that elephants benefit greatly from having such a closely knit community." "The obvious advantage of living in a society like that is defense of the young, teaching of the young, and, ah, group, ah, defense against predators." "You can imagine the, the constant anxiety and concern of this young female about a baby." "So, if there is a slightest hint of a predator, say a hyena, and hyenas do get in sometimes and bite off the tails of the babies." "So, ah, predators can be a real threat." "Another advantage of living in a group is that all the group can help in rearing the young, and it is amazing in elephant society how much time is spent by young females looking after small calves." "They are absolutely fascinated." "Technically, they are known as elemothers in the biological world, but we call them also "unties"." "And they hang around the calves and constantly look after them." "Of course, if they get stuck in the mud or something, all hell breaks loose, and a baby only has to make a minor protest for a huge response from the group, probably egged on by these elemothers." "A family's frantic rescue attempt captured by Wildlife filmmakers" "Dereck and Beverly Joubert shows how precious a calf is." "At best, a mother bears just one every four years." "At such times of crisis, the family relies on the experience of the oldest and wisest female, the matriarch." "The matriarch leads the family in its day to day routines." "But in times of drought, for example, she must guide them to areas outside their usual range." "This is when the remarkable memory of the elephant comes into its own." "The matriarch dredges from her store of knowledge the best routes to take to exploit remote pockets of vegetation or pools of water, or where to obtain salt in a nutrient-poor habitat." "This information has been gathered throughout her life by watching and committing to memory the paths taken by the previous matriarchs." "All the members of the family unit will depend heavily on the memory bank of the matriarch." "She will remember where to go in times of drought." "She will know what to do in times of insecurity, because she has been through it all and the longer lived she is, the more successful she is." "And the fact that this valuable information is stored there, makes it all more tragic when a matriarch gets wiped out." "And, of course, she will be the first to go in a poaching epidemic because she has the largest tusks." "When elephants stray from the security of national parks, they are at the mercy of poachers and unsympathetic farmers." "Lan Douglas Hamilton hopes that by finding out where they go, he can negotiate their freedom of movement with the people they encounter." "But how do you follow an animal for months at a time traveling many miles over rough terrain." "The best way is to fit it with a radio transmitter." "Beautiful." "Now we just sit and observe." "Wait till they stop." "They are a little bit alarmed." "They have run off but they will slow down and then gradually, she will drop back, and within five minutes we hope she will go down." "When she goes down, we have to get up fairly quickly because sometimes the others may try to help her, but in helping her, they may put their tusks and actually wound her a bit." "Felling the matriarch would cause pandemonium among the family so they have darted Maude, her closest companion." "O.K. Let us have the collar out." "She has been tusked." "She has been tusked." "Yeah." "They tried to help her to get up, that is the problem." "James, can you see if you can grab this from the other side." "This operation is always fraught with anxiety." "They have to get in and out quickly so that the elephant does not overheat." "They only have half an hour to fit the radio collar and administer the fast acting antidote." "Right." "That is fine." "Can I just check the measurements?" "Go." "Go." "Go ahead." "Here she comes." "It is a moment of great relief when Maude finally arises to her feet." "Off she goes to rejoin her family." "They are there in the distance." "Douglas Hamilton has been radio tracking elephants since the 1970s, when poaching was at its height." "Only now are the elephants making the long journey back to some of their favorite feeding grounds." "Incredibly, they are still able to retrace their footsteps twenty years later." "There she is!" "There she is." "Yes." "There she is." "Well, there we go." "But having such a long memory is proving to be a handicap." "Some memories are very attractive, but there may be an old matriarch who remembers a place that she could not go to but she would like to go to because the food was particularly good." "Now, after the poaching is relaxed, she goes back there and finds that somebody has very considerately planted a field of maize for her, and herein lies the conflict between people and elephants." "And unfortunately, the elephant is the inevitable loser." "A matriarch devotes her lifetime to building a store of knowledge for the benefit of the family," "but bulls have a very different agenda." "They leave their families in their early teens to pursue an increasingly solitary existence, and wander far and wide in search of potential mates." "In the mating game, young males start with an overwhelming disadvantage, their size." "For the female, size is everything and she will usually reject the advances of small bulls." "She is only interested in the biggest and strongest males." "Among these bulls, competition to mate is intense and occasionally, violent." "If they had to fight every time to prove their dominance, they would not live very long." "Instead, they make use of their prodigious memory." "From the time they are infants, males tests their strength by sparring with each other." "Throughout their lives, they create a memory bank the relative strengths of the other bulls to estimate their chances of winning in a real fight." "This pecking order is thrown into chaos, however, when a male comes into musth" "Characterized by a screaming temporal gland and dribbling penis, this seasonal surge of testosterone thumping through its body makes it highly belligerent." "A weaker bull in musth will take a chance against a stronger opponent, and battle may commence." "Fights can go on for up to two days, sometimes to the death." "But they will only occur when there is a prize worth fighting for, a nearby female in heat." "Elephant mating requires not just balance but superb sense of timing." "A bull may have to wait up to forty years to mate." "Then, he has to know when a female is fertile, which is just for two days out of every four years." "This is because she is either pregnant or she is weaning her calf for the rest of that period." "Yet bulls who range over vast areas seem to be able to home in on a female just when she is at the peak of her fertility." "Is there some mysterious form of communication going on here?" "For years, Dr. Joyce Pool has been studying how elephants communicate." "There have been many stories by hunters and naturalists about groups of elephants, ah, perhaps several miles apart, apparently moving in, in, in synchrony." "And then came up the idea of elephant ESP." "Pool knew that there must be a more scientific explanation for these hunters' tales." "Her observations of elephant families provided a clue." "For many years we have noticed on occasion a female will suddenly freeze, and all the rest of the elephants stop at the same time, as if they have heard a sound and we did not hear anything." "Or occasions where again a female at the back of the line might open her mouth very loudly as if she was rumbling and yet we, we could not hear anything and it, it really made us wonder whether, in fact, the elephants were making sounds that we could not hear." "Long distance communication remained a mystery until a chance observation fifteen years ago by Zoologist Katie Paine." "I felt a throbbing in the air in the zoo near the elephant cage, and it flashed me back to a memory from thirty-four years before when I was thirteen years old." "Ah, I was singing in a chorus, ah, and we were singing Bach, ah, St. Matthew Passion." "This particular chorus has a very low pitched bass voice." "The organ descends and descends and descends and when it got the bottom," "I began to feel more than I could hear the sound." "I lost my sense of pitch." "I could just feel throbbing." "That was the same thing I felt in the zoo." "And when I was in the zoo, I thought, well, my goodness, perhaps elephants are making sounds so low pitched that I cannot hear them at all, but still very powerful so that I feel them." "Ah, Friday, fourteenth of June, ten fifty-five, twelve... thirteen..." "fourteen... fifteen... sixteen." "Channel One is at twenty-five." "Channel Two is at thirty-five." "Paine returned to the zoo with equipment used to record low pitched sound, or infrasound." "This sound is inaudible under normal circumstances but can be brought into the range of human hearing by speeding up the tape." "This is a tape of one of those moments when we felt the throbbing in the air in the zoo." "First I play it the way we heard it, real time." "I am really not hearing any elephants sounds." "I just hear equipment noise." "Now if I take this same piece of tape and rewind it and play it back, ten times speeded up, the pitch of all the sounds will go up and very low sounds will now become audible." "All of those sounds are elephant sounds we did not hear before." "They are all below the frequencies that people can hear." "It was a tremendous moment to realize that we had found a new dimension in acoustic communication." "Nobody had listened, ah, for infrasound among land animals before." "No one had thought there was an animal large enough to make powerful low frequency sounds like this." "And what it meant for the elephants was that they might be able to use it to communicate over long distances, because infrasound travels much better than high frequency sounds." "We know from our experiments that elephants respond to each other calls over at least four kilometers." "When there is a real crisis, my guess is that elephants communicate over ten to twenty kilometers." "How can infrasound travel these distances?" "Sound which falls into the range of human hearing does not travel very far because it consists of short sound waves which are easily scattered when they hit obstacles like trees or shrubs." "Infrasound consists of long sound waves which bend round obstacles with very little scattering;" "consequently, travel much further." "The discovery of the previously unheard voice of the elephant confirms how sophisticated their system of communication really is." "Joyce Pool is attuned to the subtle nuances of elephant vocalization, and is attempting to decipher their language." "In order to figure out what a call means, there is just hours and hours of watching and listening to elephants." "But it is, it is hard even to figure out who has made the call because the low frequency calls are very hard for our human ears to localize." "Ah, one thing that helps are the, the, the ear flaps because elephants tend to flap their ears in a certain way when they have called." "But during a let us go rumble, they might flap their ears very slowly as they are rumbling." "During a greeting rumble... it is quite different." "They hold their ears very high, ah, and flap them quite rapidly." "What to an untrained ear might sound like a cacophony of bellowing and rumbling, to Joyce Pool is meaningful." "Many calls are, are quite simple." "For instance, a call meaning..." "I want more milk... ah, or another call meaning..." "let us go... whereas other calls seem to be very complex." "There is a series of rumbles that are almost like a discussion with one female saying, ah, let us go this way." And another female saying, no, I want to go in the other direction."" "Who knows what they are actually saying to one another, but so far we have identified some thirty-three different calls made by elephants:" "Rumbles, trumpets, snorts, groans, bellows, and so on, each with a different meaning." "But I feel we are just at the beginning." "It is now thought that this communication is at least as sophisticated as that of great apes, whales and dolphins." "Joyce Pool makes even greater claims believing that elephants may be conscious in the same way we are." "People tend to think that only humans are self aware but from the years that I have spent with elephants, I do think that they, too, are self aware." "I think that they have a sense of humor, for instance." "Watching elephants sometimes, ah, in the way that they play." "Ah, certain expressions they make as if they are amused at their own actions." "Times that I have sort of played with elephants, and those games are remembered many years later." "And the elephants will come towards the car and waggle their head in a certain way with a, what we call, a smile." "Ah, as if to say, yes, I remember that game with you." "If these animals possess a sense of humor and a self awareness as Joyce Pool claims, it would suggest that they have an emotional life and feelings for each other." "The way they behave around the remains of one of their own is akin to the way humans express their grief." "Elephants seem to have an understanding of death." "It is just amazing watching elephants around the bones of other elephants." "Ah, the way they turn the bones over and examine every crevice, stepping very carefully on the bones the way they wake up a, a, baby." "Ah, what is it that they are trying to find out?" "Why are they doing this?" "It is almost like a ritual." "Who, who else has, ah, rituals around death?" "Humans." "Does this mighty creature really possess the capacity from consciousness and feelings as Joyce Pool suggests?" "We may dissect its brain, record its sounds and analyze its body language, but for now, its inner world remains beyond our grasp." "All we can say for sure is that the elephant is more than the sum of its very large parts."