Why Do Elephants Have Big Ears?

The elephant is the only surviving largest land animal now.

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Elephants belong to the mammalian order of Proboscideans.
Proboscideans means Massive herbivorous (feeding only on plants) mammals having tusks and a
long trunk.

There are two presently surviving species in elephants.
One is African and the other is Asian.

African elephants are comparatively bigger in size than Asian elephants.
And also there is size variation between male and female elephants.

Amazon’s Kid’s Stuff

Male elephants are generally bigger than female elephants.

The Height (taken at the shoulders) of the fully grown male African elephant may be 4 m (13 feet).

And the weight may be at around 7 tons.

A fully grown male Asian elephant may be 3.3 m (11 feet) tall,

and weigh 5.4 tons.

They are herbivores. They feed chiefly on grass and other plants.

Their average life span in the wild may be up to 70 years.

The most obvious features of elephants are the trunk; a pair of tusks; thick, pillar-like legs; broad
feet; and large ears or ear flaps.

The trunk is an extension of nose and upper lip.
Elephants use trunk mainly for the following purposes;

  1. Manipulating and lifting and feeding, etc.,
  2. Drinking and spraying water,
  3. Smelling,
  4. Touching,
  5. Producing trumpeting sounds.

Tusks are used for defense and for crushing vegetation.
The thick pillar-like legs and broad feet are used to support the massive body of the elephants.
Moreover, their big feet detect the vibrations underground and enable them to detect the
stampeding of animals from miles away like a signal to detect the predators nearing.

And most interestingly, let’s talk about the purpose of the larger ear flaps of the animals.

The larger ear flaps of elephants work as radiators.
They keep the elephants cool.

So, we can come to the fact that the process of heat dissipation of their huge body is done through
the many blood vessels of the large ears into the air.
This process is similar to the radiator in a car or a vehicle.

One more thing is that the reason why Asian elephants have, comparatively, smaller ears than
African elephants is only because they live amid the shaded and cooled cover of the rainforest in Asia.

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