Elephants spend nearly 80% of their waking time eating. Herbivorous and not very picky, elephants can consume everything from grasses and leaves to fruits and roots — they can even eat twigs or bark. But that’s just the short version.
Why do elephants need to eat so much?
It’s hard being an elephant. Imagine having to guzzle down a minimum of 150 kg of food each day. This is what elephants have to do every single day of their lives. That’s just the amount of food it takes to keep being the world’s largest terrestrial mammal.
Elephants aren’t humans; they aren’t foodies on an Eat, Pray, Love journey. Instead, eating is very serious business for elephants.
Even at first glance, 150 kg of food every day seems a bit excessive. They don’t just chomp down on all this food at once either. Elephants spend up to three-quarters of their day looking for or consuming food. Basically, their job is food.
Weighing in at an average of 6,000 kilograms (6 tons) — the weight of a school bus — elephants aren’t just herbivores; they’re megaherbivores. Basically, megaherbivores are any plant-loving animals that weigh over 1000 kilograms (or a ton).
Elephants aren’t the only megaherbivore species alive today. Joining them in this class, are three other iconic African fauna; namely hippos, rhinos, and giraffes. Among the four species, elephants are comfortably the largest and heaviest. To keep their 6,000-kilogram selves upright and alive, these giants need to feed quite a bit to keep themselves going every day — because they don’t get to keep all that they eat.
In spite of their massive bodies, elephants actually don’t have a very good digestive system. They can only digest 44 percent of all the food they eat. Basically, the vast amount of plant matter they eat daily is to make up for their bum digestion.
Contrary to what their size (and tusks) would lead you to believe — elephants are very much herbivores. These gentle giants only eat plants. All elephants are herbivores who eat plants — this is a well-established fact. From grasses and grains to leaves and fruits, elephants can just about eat any part of a plant. As a matter of fact, they don’t even leave the bark alone!
Elephants eat bark?!
Elephants use tree bark like humans use cereal. Without munching on tree bark, elephants would be digesting very little of the food they eat. This is because bark is filled with a ton of minerals, like calcium, as well as fiber. All this good stuff helps boost the elephants’ digestive systems. In essence, tree bark helps them get the most energy out of all the other foods that they eat.
Diets across species
Although elephants can eat a lot of plants (as well as almost all parts of these plants) this doesn’t necessarily mean they actually eat every plant they see. Basically, just because elephants have a broad diet doesn’t mean they go on a plant-eating spree.
There’s more than just one species of elephant, although there is some debate around that. In fact, not all biologists acknowledge the African elephant as a separate species.
Elephant diets depend very much on their habitats. Currently, the planet hosts three extant species of elephants, namely, the African bush elephant, the African forest elephant, and finally, much much further away in Asia, the Asian elephant.
Quite obviously, African elephants and Asian elephants feed on a few different plants by virtue of their location. For instance, Asian elephants — a species spread over 13 or so Asian nations — prefer to feed on plants like bamboo, palms, and grasses. All three of these plants are monocots (don’t worry — we’ll explain the monocot part in a bit).
In contrast, their African counterparts (bush and forest) prefer munching on tree saplings and have a greater affinity for snacking on tree bark.
If this difference in diets seems insignificant — think again. Elephants are ecosystem engineers. They’re big animals that trample and knock down whatever is in their way. Their very presence alters their environment and by extension, the environment of all other animals that live there as well.
To maintain this world-building stature, elephants also need to eat a lot of food. Essentially, when elephants aren’t breaking literal ground when moving, they’re also removing plants from their ecosystems as fuel for their body. All this tinkering has a very tangible effect on the habitats they live in.
Trendsetting diets
In a bid to investigate just how much elephants affect their environments, a team of scientists decided to take stock of the vegetation of two Malaysian forests. One of these forests, the Krau Wildlife Reserve, did not house elephants while the second forest — – the Royal Belum State Park — did.
The team was comprised of an international group of biologists, from the University of Nottingham as well as the University of Florida, led by Professor John Terborgh, an expert in tropical biology and conservation.
The team found very clear differences in floral diversity between the two forests. These differences ultimately come down to the presence of elephants in one of the sites.
Down the monocot rabbit hole
Remember when we said we’d explain what monocots are? Well, monocots are just plants whose seeds have one seed coat — like bamboo and other grasses. If you still don’t care about what monocots are — that’s ok. What you should actually focus on is the fact that Asian elephants particularly love munching on them.
The team was able to corroborate this love for monocots in a very significant way. When the team compared the vegetation community of the Krau Wildlife Reserve, the forest with no elephant presence, to that of the Royal Belum State Park, the forest with elephant presence, they noticed something strange. Not only did Krau Wildlife Reserve have a significant abundance of monocots but more importantly, the Royal Belum State Park had virtually no monocots over a meter tall. Basically, elephants in Royal Belum had eaten almost all the old-growth monocots in the park!
Unlike their African counterparts, Asian elephants ignore tree saplings when it comes time to grab grub. Dr Ahimsa Campos-Arceiz, one of the principal investigators on the team, commented on just how astounding the inferences of their research were. Campos-Arceiz also stressed the threat of increasing human-wildlife conflict in Malaysia as a consequence of elephants’ penchant for palm trees — a monocot plant.
“Asian elephants seem to be more interested in monocot plants, especially palms. These results have very interesting and important implications in terms of elephant ecological impact. Maybe this is the reason why Asian elephants do not seem to modify forests the way African elephants do. And human-elephant conflict is greater in Malaysia because we are planting palms which are the very food elephants love to eat. We are currently continuing this work through direct observations of elephant feeding in Malaysian rainforests,” said Dr. Campos Arceiz in a press release.
Diets across individuals
It’s common knowledge that elephants eat plants; everyone knows that. What is a bit unknown however is exactly what plants — down to the species — they eat. This is because elephants are a tough animal to observe in the wild.
Although large and very obviously conspicuous, monitoring elephants in the wild is a bit of a paradox. Elephants aren’t like bacteria — minuscule and invisible; obvious to all, elephants are very, very large. Technically, they should be the easiest animal in the world to observe yet it’s the opposite that’s true.
This comes down to the species’ temperament. Although highly social and emotionally intelligent, elephants are also highly territorial. They reserve the social side of their personalities for members of their own species — not humans. This makes observing the gentle giants a dangerous endeavor.
According to Tyler Kartzinel, an expert botanist from Brown University, not only are elephants a risk to monitor up close, but they also feed at inconvenient times.
“They [elephants] move long distances, they feed at night and in thick bush and a lot of the plants they feed on are quite small,” said Kartzinel in a press release.
In a bid to better understand the charismatic herbivores, a group of international conservationists — including Kartizinel — conducted a study that helped reveal the actual contents of the pachyderms’ diets.
The study, conducted by an international team of conservation biologists, revealed the actual contents of individual elephant diets. As part of the study, scientists used a range of lab-based methods, like DNA metabarcoding, as well as field-based methods, like radio-collaring, to help nail down the exact nature of elephants’ diets.
Elephants — similar to humans — like to mix up their dietary preferences. Basically, elephant diets aren’t just determined by resources — their individual preferences as well as physiological states matter as well.
Think of it like this, a pregnant cow may crave and require different foods than a young bull in musth — a seasonal condition of heightened aggression caused by rising testosterone levels.
(For context, cows are female elephants; bulls are males)
This means that even within close-knit social groups, like families, that graze or forage in the same habitats, not all members are feeding on the same plants.
For instance, imagine a family of African bush elephants grazing out in the Savannah. The matriarch may have a preference to graze on grass whereas her calf or sisters may prefer to munch on Acacia tree saplings.
By helping establish dietary preferences on an individual level, the study was able to shed light on how social animals, like elephants, avoid conflict within their social groups.
Elephant diet
Research on the dietary preferences of wild animals isn’t just a gastronomical curiosity. Knowing what animals eat is incredibly useful conservation data.
“It’s really important for conservationists to keep in mind that when animals don’t get enough of the foods that they need, they may survive — but they may not prosper. By better understanding what each individual eats, we can better manage iconic species like elephants, rhinos and bison to ensure their populations can grow in sustainable ways,” opined Kartzinel.
For instance, research from 2022 helped establish exactly which areas Asian elephants prefer to forage in. The study tracked 102 Asian elephants in Malaysia and Borneo and found that Asian elephants spent a considerable amount of time foraging for food either on the fringes of or outside protected areas — as opposed to inside them.
This research, from the University of Nottingham and Cardiff University, explained that although protected areas (like sanctuaries and reserves) are very important for wildlife conservation, they are not enough.
“Our results show that protected areas are very important, but not enough as an overall strategy for Asian elephant conservation. Given their preference for habitats outside the protected areas, elephants will inevitably come into conflict with people. This highlights the importance of promoting human-elephant coexistence around protected areas,” said Dr Ahimsa Campos-Arceiz — one of the lead authors of this paper as well — in a press release.
