Facts On Elephants

Improved Essays
5. Elephants Elephants are considered one of the most intelligent animals on earth. It is believed that their intelligence stems from the fact that the neocortex portion of their brain is highly convoluted, which makes it similar to the brains of humans and apes. It has recently been discovered that some African elephants may warn one another about the presence of humans with a specific ‘word.’ They accomplish this by manipulating their vocal tract. They also have a ‘word’ to warn one another about the presence of bees.
Here are a few more interesting and weird facts about the elephant:
• Elephants Can Learn
An elephant can learn new facts, mimic sounds, participate in artistic activities, learn new behaviors and use tools.
• Elephants Fear Bees
Elephants are afraid of bees (not of mice); hence, their need to verbally warn their herd as a bee approaches.
• They Show Emotion They display a range of emotions similar to those of a human. These emotions include joy and playfulness as well as grief and mourning. In addition, elephants display compassion and self-awareness: A baby elephant will suck on its trunk to comfort itself. • They Have Rhythm On average, elephants keep better beat than a human does.
…show more content…
• A Connection Between Coffee and Elephant Dung?
One of the world’s most expensive brands of coffee (Black Ivory Coffee) is made from coffee beans found in the dung of Thai elephants.
6. The Honeybee

About one-third of the food we eat in America is connected to honey bee pollination. Some of the crops that honey bees help pollinate include melons, cherries, cucumbers, pears, avocados, cranberries, plums, prunes, kiwi, apricots, blueberries, etc. Now that the importance of the honey bee has been established, we can take a look at some of their weird characteristics.
Weird characteristics of the honeybee:
• A Honeybee Can Contract an STD, Per Se
Honeybees can contract sexually transmitted diseases (in the form of parasites).
• They Aren’t Afraid to Butt Heads
When a honeybee continues to dance showing favor for an unpopular nesting site, other members of the colony will headbutt her. This helps the colony reach a consensus.
• Large Numbers
During peak season (mid-summer) each colony can have anywhere from 60,000 to 80,000 bees. • The Colony’s Social Structure Each hive has three types of colony members, the queen, the drone and the worker. • The queen – a fertile female who is mother to all the honeybees within her entire colony. All she does is reproduce, laying up to 3,000 eggs each day. However, since the queen mates with up to 100 males in just a few hours, she is susceptible to contracting a sexually transmitted disease (in the form of parasites). • The drone – only purpose is to mate with a virgin queen; however, only one of a thousand have the chance to mate. • The worker – this poor bee is an infertile female responsible for performing all the labor tasks of the colony. Tasks include guarding the hives, food preparation, maintaining a comfortable temperature throughout the hive (heating and cooling), feeding the queens, brood and the drones. Sadly, during the summer months, a worker bee only lives from 6 to 8 weeks with the most common reason for death a wearing out of her wings. A honeybee flaps its wings 200 times per second

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    First, the board includes a description of the average weight, age, and health complications that apply to domestic elephants in an effort to appeal to their sense of logic: “For 8,000-to-10,000-pound creatures who spend all day on their feet and can live into their 40s, the consequence of confinement was a painful middle age, marked by arthritis, cracked toenails, and sore feet.” The use of quantifiable characteristics of the animals and evidence of real problems that result from the current state of their treatment makes the issue more substantial for readers. The presentation of data such as…

    • 669 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Cognitive Animals Some people believe elephants are not cognitive animals. However, “Elephants Can Lend a Helping Trunk”, “Elephants Know When They Need a Helping Trunk in a Cooperative Task”, and “Elephants Console Each Other” prove those people wrong. The passage, “Elephants Can Lend a Helping Trunk”, explain that elephants know when to use teamwork in order to accomplish a task. For instance, in “Elephants Can Lend a Helping Trunk”, a group of Asian elephants learned that in order to achieve a bowl of corn, they had to pull together.…

    • 597 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    I became interested in beekeeping while observing the behavior of bees while working in my garden over several days. The bees were working to increase pollination among the plants in my garden which resulted in an increase in yields from my fruit trees and vegetables. According to the American Beekeeping…

    • 525 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Each chapter of Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees begins with an epigraph, a few lines taken from various books about bees. These are used for many reasons; to connect each chapter with the major motif of bees, to provide insights in to the events of each chapter, and to accentuate the ideas about women and mothers that resonate throughout the entire story. Chapter four begins by saying that “’Honeybees are social insects and live in colonies. Each colony is a family unit, comprising a single, egg-laying female or queen and her many sterile daughters called workers. The workers cooperate in the food-gathering, nest-building and rearing the offspring.…

    • 382 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Big Al Essay

    • 647 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Elephants ancestors have been traced back to 38 million years ago (MYA), known as a Palaeomastodon. Elephants are mammals classified as Taxonomy. Elephants are pachyderms, which range from 9.8 to 13.1 feet tall and reach over seven tons. There are two types of elephants known to use today the Asian elephant, and African elephant. The African elephant is the larger of the two and is also sub classed into the African forest elephant and…

    • 647 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Gasper Farm Essay

    • 681 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Gasper Farms, located in Rooks County, Kansas is owned and operated by Dan and Lois Gasper. The diversified operation consists of 3,000 acres of cropland and pasture along with 110 red angus cow-calf pairs. Gasper Farms has always been a family business with their 3 children helping out when they lived at home. Today, their son, Joe assists with taking more responsibility managing the cattle herd. During harvest the entire family joins in to gather the bounty of the season.…

    • 681 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Oak Savanna Research Paper

    • 1294 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Savannas are bumpy grasslands with distant shrubs and trees. They are normally in a warm climate year round, with only two seasons, very long and dry season and the wet season. Roughly the temperature stays above 70 degrees F all year. This is a generic description of a generic savanna, but the Oregon Oak Savanna in Oregon is no where near generic. The Oregon Oak Savanna is home to many plants and animals that are massively influential on the human race.…

    • 1294 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    PARCC Practice Analysis Essay How would you react if you read about how unique elephant behaviors are? In the articles “Elephants Can Lend a Helping Trunk,” “Elephants Know When They Need a Helping Trunk in a Cooperative Situation,” and “Elephants Console Each Other,” authors Virginia Morell and Joshua Plotnick discuss the high cognition elephants have. They are able to tell when another another elephants needs assistance or if they’re in need of consolation. The authors’ purpose of the articles is to show the mental awareness elephants have of each other when they need help or are in distress.…

    • 825 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Honeybees Decline

    • 270 Words
    • 2 Pages

    These seemingly tireless creatures pollinate about one-third of crop species in the U.S. Honeybees pollinate about 100 flowering food crops including apples, nuts, broccoli, avocados, soybeans, asparagus, celery, squash and cucumbers, citrus fruit, peaches, kiwi, cherries, blueberries, cranberries, strawberries, cantaloupe, melons, as well as animal-feed crops, such as the clover that’s fed to dairy cows. Essentially all…

    • 270 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Kayden African elephants migrate multiple times a year. How long they migrate depends on their habitat. They to places with more food and water. African elephants have big ears trunks and tusks.…

    • 151 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Superior Essays

    As depicted in The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd and…

    • 1481 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Georgia State Insect

    • 878 Words
    • 4 Pages

    The honeybee helps contribute to Georgia’s economy by making honey and aiding pollination of more than 50 crops. Bee pollination is big for humans and plants. “Honeybees live in hives of up to 80,000 individuals. ”(statesymbolsusa.org).…

    • 878 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Apples, avocados, cucumbers, onions, almonds, cranberries - what do they share in common? Besides the fact that they are examples of popular, everyday foods, they also share another theme: their production, as well as the production of several other foods, depends on pollination from bees. Logic says that without the presence of bees, agriculture would be intensely impacted. Yet, this very issue has begun to occur. In 2006, it was first reported that large numbers of seemingly healthy bees spontaneously disappeared and left behind vulnerable, weakened colonies (Foster, et al., 2007).…

    • 1199 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Great Essays

    Introduction Colony collapse disorder (CCD) is causing a decline in honeybee population in the United States that in turn affects the nation’s economy and ecology. This paper will examine what CCD is, what the possible causes of CCD are, its impact on the nation’s economy and ecology, different treatment options, how this impacts the local area around the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and what the future might hold for bees in the United States. Colony collapse disorder is a disease that causes worker bees to inexplicably not return to the hive resulting in abandonment and eventual death of the hive (PR Newswire, 2012). In fact, when this disease takes hold of a honeybee hive, there is a distinct lack of bees in and around the hive, dead or alive (Fries, 2014). So far, no single marker has been found that causes CDD, although there has been speculation from climate change and pesticides to parasites (Watanabe, 2009).…

    • 1782 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Elephants have similar human emotions and experiences as us, especially when considering their great mental capacity. “When an elephant dies, its family members engage in intense mourning and burial rituals, conducting weeklong vigils over the body” (Siebert 355). Through these actions and rituals, it becomes clear that elephants have the ability to love, care, and grieve for one another. This is extremely similar to how humans perform last rites for one another at their time of death to show their emotions towards another member of their species and society. “Young elephants are raised within an extended, multitiered network of doting female caregivers” (Siebert 355).…

    • 1851 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Improved Essays