[Kate] Elephants: A Comparison

When we were in Laos we did a half-day elephant experience (no riding).  Mostly we feed the elephants and walked around with them.  But more recently we went to an animal park in South Africa, which has a variety of wildlife in it.  It's set up so you drive around on roads and see the animals (it's against the rules to get out of the car).  We got pretty up close to many, many elephants that day, including some truly adorable babies.

The difference between the two experiences (or one of them, at any rate) was that they we saw different types of elephants: Asian elephants and African elephants.

To tell the difference between them, one often looks at the ears.  African elephants have ears large ears shaped like the continent Africa, while Asian elephants have much smaller and shorter ears, never reaching higher than the neck.  This is because African elephants live in hotter areas than most Asian elephants, who tend to live in cooler jungly areas.  African elephants use the large surface area of their ears to keep them cool, using them as fans.

African Elephant Ear

Asian Elephant Ear

Another difference is size.  African Elephants, on average, are about 13223 pounds or 5952 pounds (depending on whether they are a bush or forest African elephant--the bush elephants are the larger ones).  But in contrast Asian elephants range from about5952 pounds to only about 11905 pounds.  African elephants are also taller.

An image of African and Asian elephants next to each other.

It'll be cool to see more African elephants in the upcoming days and see what else we discover about them.