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Elephants and Ants

Q: How much does the heaviest elephant weigh? "Elephant", Waterloo, Nebraska

African elephant and calf, Tanzania.  Photo courtesy of Gary M. Stolz, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

A: The heaviest land animal ever recorded (according to the Guinness World of Records) was a male African bush elephant shot in Mucusso Angola on November 7, 1974. He weighed 13.5 tons (12.2 tonnes)--as much as nine average-size U.S. cars.

The African bush elephant is the largest (and the second tallest) land mammal, weighing an average of 4 to 8 tons (4-7 tonnes), and standing an average 11 feet (3.35 m) at the shoulder. He also has the largest ears: 4 feet wide, 6 feet long, and covering his shoulders.

He starts life big--three feet (1 m) tall and over 200 pounds (91 kg)--a size convenient for wandering under his mother. He just fits. He can walk 20 minutes after birth and nurses for four years since his baby teeth are only the size of quarters and not good for much. His mother wraps her trunk around him and helps him to his feet if he stumbles. She boosts him over fallen logs and pulls him out of mud.

When the mother gives birth, she leans against another female. Other elephant cows and calves gather, rumble loudly, wave their trunks, and flap their ears. The baby drops to the ground.

The trunk--both a nose and an upper lip--is a 5-foot (1.5 m) boneless hunk of flesh, weighing 300 pounds (136 kg), with two opposing 'fingers' at the tip. An elephant can pick up objects as small as seeds with the tip or carry a 600-pound (270 kg) log with the trunk wrapped around like a lifting chain. He constantly sniffs the ground and raises his trunk high to sniff the air. His sense of smell is the sense that he relies on most. He can smell a human more than a mile away.

Elephants hear well, too, especially low-frequency sounds below human hearing (called infrasound). They communicate with infrasound calls over long distances (at least 2.5 miles and perhaps twice that) as they range together. Their language has more than 25 calls, each with a different meaning.

A mother comforts her calf by stroking with her trunk. Young males play by trunk wrestling. When two elephants greet, each places the trunk tip in the other's mouth. A family welcomes a long-gone member by spinning around, flapping their ears, and trumpeting.

An elephant digs for water and food and fights with his tusks, which are upper incisors that can lift and carry a one-ton load. He chops through 440 pounds (200 kg) of tough leaves and grasses a day and, not surprisingly, wears out teeth. He gets six sets during his life, the last when he's 40 years old. If he wears those out, he probably starves. The tusks grow throughout his life like fingernails.

A matriarch leads the group of females and calves; males travel alone. She holds the family's knowledge within her excellent memory. She knows migration routes, where to find fruit, and how to find water during drought. She passes her knowledge to the younger females.

An elephant's legs are pillars with nearly round feet. The foot expands as it takes the animal's weight and contracts as the animal lifts his leg--handy when extracting a foot from mud. Each foot is tough enough to wander over stones but padded for quiet comfortable travel. An elephant leaves almost no trace as he walks across the land.

Further Surfing:

Guinness World Records

Tour Kenya: the elephant

Further Reading: If my mom were a platypus by Dia L. Michels, Platypus Media LLC

Q: Recently, you said that queen ants live as long as their colonies. Which dies first the colony or the queen? --Kevin A., San Francisco, California

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

A: This is a tricky question since some species of ants have multiple queens. Let's consider colonies with only one queen first. It's a close tie. Sometimes one way; sometimes the other.

Young colonies often hit hard times and all worker ants die. The queen dies soon thereafter. For older colonies, however, the reverse may happen--the queen dies first. Then the colony dies within a few months if the workers are in poor health, or up to a couple of years later if they're healthy.

Before a new queen can found a colony, she must mate. This induces her to cast off her wings.

The young queen starts by making a nest. She digs a chamber under shelter--perhaps a stone or tree bark. For some small ant species, as the queen gets her first brood going, she leaves the nest occasionally to forage for food. When the brood gets old enough to function as worker ants, they take over these jobs and she only lay eggs as long as she lives--perhaps 20 years or more.

However, when starting new colonies, most queen ants don't leave the nest to scrounge food. Instead, they live off the food reserves in the now useless wing muscles.

Special cases: The Lasius species in Niger is strange. When the queen dies, the worker ants produce eggs. Stranger: They produce clones.

Ant life gets complicated when the colony has more than a single queen. Although we know of many such species, we haven't studied them well enough to know behavior details--such as, which dies first: the colony or queen(s). Certainly, with many queens to lay eggs, the queen is replaceable.

Further Surfing:

WonderQuest: What insect has the longest life span?

myrmecology.org: The scientific study of ants

Ant Cam: FAQ about ants

Ant Cam: Live video of larvae and ants in a nest

Q: Does a queen ant get too old to produce eggs?

A: Generally, no. At least, they live almost their entire life before egg production stops. In a lab colony, one cornfield queen ant lived 22 years and produced fertile eggs until her last few months.

(Answered Dec. 6, 2002)