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There are about 415,000 African elephants and about 50,000 Asian elephants worldwide. ©Ondrej Prosicky/Shutterstock.com According to the IUCN , African elephants have an estimated population of ...
Elephants are a keystone species as they help to shape and maintain the ecosystem. This earns them the name ecosystem engineers. One of the ways that they help the ecosystem is by using their ...
The pre-eminent threats to the Asian elephant today are habitat loss, degradation, and fragmentation, which are driven by an expanding human population, and lead in turn to increasing conflicts between humans and elephants when elephants eat or trample crops. Hundreds of people and elephants are killed annually as a result of such conflicts.
Elephants can have a negative impact on ecosystems. At Murchison Falls National Park in Uganda, elephant numbers have threatened several species of small birds that depend on woodlands. Their weight causes the soil to compress, leading to runoff and erosion .
Garganornis ballmanni, a very large fossil goose from the Gargano and Scontrone islands of the Late Miocene. Foster's rule, also known as the island rule or the island effect, is an ecogeographical rule in evolutionary biology stating that members of a species get smaller or bigger depending on the resources available in the environment.
The African forest elephant was long considered to be a subspecies of the African elephant, together with the African bush elephant. Morphological and DNA analysis showed that they are two distinct species. [4] [5] The taxonomic status of the African pygmy elephant (Loxodonta pumilio) was uncertain for a long time.
The Sumatran elephant (Elephas maximus sumatranus) is one of three recognized subspecies of the Asian elephant, and native to the Indonesian island of Sumatra.In 2011, IUCN upgraded the conservation status of the Sumatran elephant from endangered to critically endangered in its Red List as the population had declined by at least 80% during the past three generations, estimated to be about 75 ...
The Indian elephant is a cultural symbol throughout its range in Asia and appears in various religious traditions and mythologies. The elephants are treated positively and are sometimes revered as deities, often symbolizing strength, wisdom and good fortune. [36] It is revered as a form of Lord Ganesha in Hinduism.