Why do elephants have such big ears?

Do they serve a purpose? Please include links. Thanks!

Why do elephants have such big ears?
The big ears are to help the elephants stay cool. Elephants don't sweat, so they have a hard time dissipating excess heat (keeping cool). Their large ears contain many blood vessels that allow heat to escape into the air. When you see elephants they are usually moving their ears back and forth. This fanning helps to dissipate more heat than if their ears remained still.





The enormous ears of elephants act as cooling devices. The gigantic earflaps (which can measure up to 2 square metres (21.5 square feet) are equipped with an intricate web of blood vessels. When the animal flaps its ears, the blood temperature lowers by as much as 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit).





http://www.iucn.org/themes/ssc/sgs/afesg...
Reply:(1)


Elephants can weigh up to 8 tons; their front teeth can be up to 3 meters in length and can weigh over 200 kg. And the African elephant has the largest earflaps of any animal in history. The elephant's ears, in case you are wondering, act as radiators, an important consideration if you are a lumbering giant baking under the tropical sun.





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(2)


More About Elephants That I Thought You Might Find Intellectually Stimulating!





"Whether sad, angry, distressed, eager, or playful, elephants are this in a big way" Joyce Poole quoted in The Fate Of The Elephant





Please don't ever buy Ivory. Save an elephant and make your money work for them not against them. If you travel to exotic places or even to a shopping mall near you, never buy anything that looks like ivory as it probably is. Make your voice count and say "NO" to ivory.





Quick Physical Statistics


• Elephants typically reach puberty at thirteen or fourteen years of age


• They have offspring up until they are around fifty years old


• They may live seventy years or possibly more


• A cow produces a single calf and in very rare cases twins


• The interval between births is between two and a half to four years


• An elephant´s trunk, a union of the nose and upper lip, is a highly sensitive organ with over 100,000 muscle units.





Interesting Facts


• Elephant trunks can get very heavy. It is not uncommon to see elephants resting them over a tusk!


• Elephants cry, play, have incredible memories, and laugh!


• Elephants are sensitive fellow animals where if a baby complains, the entire family will rumble and go over to touch and caress it.


• Elephants have greeting ceremonies when a friend that has been away for some time returns to the group.


• Elephants grieve at a loss of a stillborn baby, a family member, and in many cases other elephants.


• Elephants don't drink with their trunks, but use them as "tools" to drink with. This is accomplished by filling the trunk with water and then using it as a hose to pour it into the elephant's mouth.


• Interestingly, the Asian elephant is more closely related to the extinct mammoth than to the African elephant (see evolution).





"Therefore understanding that rests in what it does not understand is the finest" Chuang Tzu translated by Burton Watson





An Introduction to Elephant Impact


A Super Keystone Species


It seems inevitable that as long as we humans impose our own theories on how to best govern nature, there will be a difference of opinion of "animal" management. Over the course of evolution, the elephant as we know it today has evolved into a strong forced bulldozer that has the power to modify the landscape it resides in. For elephants their effect on the landscape is often considered destruction, but is it?


The answer to this question partially depends on your preconceived views of "nature". If you see nature as something static and in a particular way then any change no matter how minute will amount to destruction. An interesting statistic found in the book African Elephants: A Celebration of Majesty about this issue; a general estimation shows that Man is clearing more forests in one day that all the elephants in Africa will 'destroy' within one year. Put in perspective, the effect that elephants have on their environment may not be as serious are we have been led to believe.


Unfortunately for some, our narrow opinion of seeing elephants as only living bulldozers of destruction is far from the case. As much as 80 percent of what elephants consume is returned to the soil as barely digested highly fertile manure.


The Ecological Impact of the Elephant is Priceless!


• Elephants provide a vital role in the ecosystem they inhabit.


• They modify their habitat by converting savannah and woodlands to grasslands


• Elephants can provide water for other species by digging water holes in dry riverbeds


o the depressions created by their footprints and their bodies trap rainfall


• Elephants act as seed dispersers by their fecal matter. It is often carried below ground by dung beetles and termites causing the soil to become more aerated and further distributing the nutrients


• Their paths act as firebreaks and rain water conduits


• An Elephants journey through the high grass provides food for birds by disturbing small reptiles, amphibians or insects.





In the tradition of elephant sites, we have provided a breakdown of elephants into two categories for basic physical statistics. Keep in mind that the two "groups" are quite different genetically and the Asian elephant (as noted) is actually more closely related to the extinct mammoth than the African elephant.





Sri Lankan


Elephas Maximus Maximus Mainland


Elephas Maximus Indicus Sumatran


Elephas Maximus Sumatranus


Height 2-3.5 metres 2-3 metres 2-2.5 metres


Weight 3-5 tonnes 2.5-4.5 tonnes 2-4 tonnes


Colour grey with large areas of depigmentation lighter grey very light grey





The Asian elephant, Elephas Maximus, has an enormous domed head with relatively small ears, an arched back and a single finger like protuberance that is located at the tip of the trunk. An Asian elephant has five toes on the front of the feet and and four on the back.


A large bull could typically weighs six tons and is ten feet high at the shoulder. As with gorillas, there is a large degree of sexual dimorphism between males and females in Asian Elephants where adult females are about half the size of the largest males.


The males have tusks and the females have 'tushes', which are shore second incisors that just stick out beyond the upper lip. However, it is important to note that on occasion females some times have longer tushes than described.


The gestation period is between nineteen and twenty-two months. Periodically, it is noted that male infants typically have a slightly longer term than females.





Savannah


Loxodonta Africana Africana Forest


Loxodonta Africana Cyclotis


Height 3-4 metres 2-3 metres


Weight 4-7 tonnes 2-4 tonnes


Colour grey dark grey





The African elephant, Loxodonta Africana, have a straight back, enormous ears, and two trunk 'fingers'.


African elephants are named for the peculiar shaped ridges of their molar teeth; the ridges of an African elephant's teeth are coarser and fewer than those of the Asian elephant.


The African elephant has only four toes on the front feet and three on the back. Interestingly, it has one more vertebra in the lumbar section of the spine.


Both sexes have tusks, and they are also larger in size as compared to male and female Asian elephants.


The largest African elephant recorded weighed over nine tons and stood more than twelve feet high at the shoulder. As in Asian elephants, the female African elephant is generally half the size of a fully grown male.


Gestation period tends to be slightly longer than in the Asian elephant.
Reply:Elephants have big ears because like us I assume they need them big for balance due to their tremendous size.
Reply:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant#Ea...
Reply:(sorry, the link is in my head...)


They have an incredible blood supply system (veins) throughout their ears which, by flapping, cools their head %26amp; body.
Reply:Mike. Its a proportional thing. Think about it for a moment. How good would little tiny ears look on an elephant anyway?
Reply:All the better to hear you with my dear!


Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Reply:http://rds.yahoo.com/_ylt=A0geu_VTFWtHW5...
Reply:That’s what make the wind blow over there.
Reply:Da better to hear you with...
Reply:Deoribonucliecacid (DNA) and what genes were passed down, id say and something to do with the mass of the craeture and heat control.
Reply:They do have a purpose. Elephant ears have a lot of blood vessels in them and they use the ears to cool. So when an elephant is hot, it pumps a lot of blood through the ears and then fans the ears to cool off the blood. Cooling off the blood in turn cools off the animal.
Reply:First off, African elephants have large ears. Asian elephants have big ears but nothing like the African species. The African elephant's ear's are filled with blood vessels. The ears are then used to cool the elephant's body by circulation blood through these vessels to get them further from the heat source of the body therefore cooling the elephant.
Reply:YOU SEE !! THEY USE THEM AS FAN !!
Reply:Hello mike...i hope you are ok once again...Elephants have so big ears because they are to help them to cool them.Lots of blood vessels going through there and flapping them releses head....i hope my answer is enough for answer...c u....bb
Reply:Elephants are the gossips of the savanna. They use the big ears to pickup the juicy tidbits about the hyennas and other ner-do-wells.
Reply:they r just born that way


- they r used to cool themselves
Reply:because they have a bunch of blood vessels in their ears. as it goes through the thinner ears(as opposed to everything else) it cools that way they can keep a little cooler.
Reply:I would think that it would be so they could hear their surroundings more clearly and give them time to move their mammoth bodies away from impending danger.
Reply:This I must admit is not a subject I am familiar with, but it seemed like it might be cool to know. So I typed elephants into the search engine and a quick look at their anatimy revealed some really interesting facts.


The first thing I discovered was Asian elephants have big ears about 60cm x 30cm and African elephants have really big ears measuring 183cm x 114cm about 3 times the size of their asian cousins.


An elephants ear is such an important part of the animal and plays several major roles ensuring their wellbeing and survival.


The elephants ear has a major function keeping an elephant comfortable by regulating its body temprature, quite essential in a hot climate, especially when you weigh as much as one of these babies. Because of an elephants large mass, and


low surface area in comparison, heat loss through radiation is really quite inefficient.


The large surface area of an elephants ear with it's large network of veins and arteries allows the hotter blood from its internal functions to be cooled as it passes through this network to be used again.


On a hot day in Africa, elephants may be seen standing down wind with there ears open, allowing the cool breeze blow across their hot arteries.


African elephants also use them to ward off potential preditors, as well as a signaling device.


An elephant can on an average day haer another 4 km's away and when its quiet over 9 km's spanning a 100km radius.


And just like human fingerprints no elephant has ears the same as another.


Scientists also now believe that they allow the species an infrasound capibility, basically allowing them a secret language because unly elephants can hear the frequency.
Reply:they have big ears to fan them self with, honestly that's why in nature programs the elephants are always flapping their ears.








here's a link to prove i'm not lying





http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant#Ea...
Reply:To help with cooling of the body.
Reply:You'll have to find the links yourself, but I'll give you a hint. It has to do with body heat control.
Reply:Everything on the elephant is large. It would look silly with ears the size of ours.





Actually, different types of elephants have differently sized ears. African elephants have very large ears. Asian elephants have smaller ears. You could probably look it up in Wikipedia or someplace else fairly easy to use, so I won't bother giving you the links.





Here's an interesting and true story though. There are certain old Tarzan movies where they only had Asian elephants to use in the jungle scenes. The scenes are supposed to take place in Africa though, so they put large, prosthetic ears on the elephants to make them look African. Strange but true.
Reply:it's their way to cool themselves...........


this serves as their fan...........
Reply:Ummm... First of all thats the way God created them. And there purpose well i have no idea.

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