Scientific Research Grace Quagliano class 1 may 12 Elephas maximus

Reproduction:

Producing offspring by means of splitting or the union of the sperm and egg. Elephants reproduce by sexual reproduction.

Between 2007 and 2014, elephant population plummeted by at least 30%, or 144,000 elephants. The elephant population is dramatically decreasing because poachers are killing elephants for their ivory tusks. With a gestation period of 22 months, birth rates cannot keep up with this slaughter. Source: http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/31/africa/great-elephant-census/

Janine Brown, head of the SCBI Endocrine Research Lab, says that when elephants are social it increases the chance that the elephant will cycle, as well as diminish the risk of infertility due to stress. Social compatibility not only increases the chance that female elephants will cycle, but it also reduces the risk of infertility related to stress. The struggle of making sure elephants being reproductively healthy is something that zoos have problems constantly with.

Adaptation to the Environment:

A genetic change that helps an organism survive in its environment. It is past from one generation to the next because of natural selection.

Koshik, an Asian elephant, can "speak" five Korean words by tucking his trunk inside his mouth.

Dr. Joyce Poole, an elephant ethologist and co-director of ElephantVoices, studied the effects of poaching on East Africa’s elephant populations. She says that because poachers select based on tusk size they commonly kill older males. This takes away a large population of big-tusked breeding-aged males. Slowly, the genes that pass on large tusks are growing more scarce. Elephants care a sex-linked gene for tusklessness, so there are always some elephants that are tuskless. Because tusks are used for fighting, the gene in males has been slightly weeded out. For example, the baseline tuskless population might be four percent, but overtime as more and more elephants with tusks are killed, this percentage may increase to 60 percent in older elephants. When this group breeds with tuskless females, you will start to see a gene for tusklessness spreading through the population.

Consume Energy:

Cells require a constant supply of energy to generate and maintain the biological order that keeps them alive. This energy is derived from the chemical bond energy in food molecules, which thereby serve as fuel for cells.

Database Source: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sch&AN=17816392&site=scirc-live

Elephants play a significant role in maintaining the genetic diversity of trees on the savanna because when they poop they are dispersing seeds away from the parent plant and are spreading the plant to a new habitat. Each elephant may deposit nearly 3200 seeds a day; The African Elephant transports seeds further than any other land animal.

Professor Paul Manger of the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, says that because elephants are such large animals they needs more food to fuel their body. Elephants, who eat hundreds of kilograms of food each day, need to devote a lot of time to eat, which leaves less time for sleep. This explains why elephants are the shortest sleeping mammal.

Maintain Homeostasis:

Maintaining internal body conditions.

Robin Dunkin, a researcher from University of California, Santa Cruz, USA, explains that right as the environment temperature rises above an elephant's body temperature, all non-evaporative forms of heat loss aren't efficient anymore. It can actually cause the elephant to gain heat through the same pathways. This causes them to rely on evaporative cool. They are dependent on water, but the dependency is coordinated to the climate.

Credits:

Created with images by Amandad - "elephant tusk ivory" • Unsplash - "elephants baby animals mammal" • tacman10 - "elephant mother baby" • Hugh_Grant - "ivory elephant tusks" • Ben_Kerckx - "elephant trunk animal" • amanderson2 - "Elephant eating his way towards us Hluhluwe Park South Africa" • martie1swart - "Elephant" • cocoparisienne - "elephant skin elephant african bush elephant"

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