The elephant is the largest living land animal and has no natural enemies.The adult males live solitary lives except during mating. At this time, these males join elephant groups composed of up to twenty adult females and their young under the command of the oldest elephant , the matriarch. Their natural habitat is in Africa and Asia.
In this article I will restrict myself to the trunk because of its importance to the elephant.
An elephant can use its trunk to carry a tree, pick up a peanut, have a drink or take a shower.The Elephant trunk is the modified nose and upper lip lined with as many as forty plus individual muscles that allow it to bend and hold like an arm or hand. The fingure like projections at the very end of the trunk are sensitive enough to pick up objects as small as a single blade of grass. The African elephant differs from the Asian elephant at the tip of its trunk.The former has two lips while the latter has only one. The six main functions of the elephant trunk include:
Sucking: The Elephant trunk sucks up to fourteen litres of water then blows it into its mouth or sprays its body to keep cool. It can also suck in dust and spray its body to reduce the parasite load.
Feeding: The trunk is used to break off tree branches, pick off leaves and grass and even pluck fruits and put them into its mouth. For the elephant to feed, the trunk is indispensable.
As a sense organ, the elephant trunk is its "fingure" as well as its nose. The elephant has a very well developed sense of smell. Raising the trunk up and swaying it from side to side, it can determine the location of friends, enemies, and food sources, much like a periscope. To follow a track, an elephant sweeps its trunk over the ground like a metal detector. It also uses the tip of its trunk to investigate another's genitalia or mouth for clues about its identity, sex, age, and reproductive status.
Defence: The elephant defends itself by grasping and flinging the enemy using its trunk.
The trunk also plays a major role in social interactions such as play wrestling,caressing, during courtship and even in the mother baby relationship.
Communication: One of the many ways of communication in the rich elephant language is rumbles and trumpets.Humans can hear the trumpets but not the rumbles because they are low frequency infrasound.It is the trunk that produces these sounds, much like a wind instrument:
