Milk bottles with baby elephant, Khanyisa and Matriarch, Tokwe not leaving her side 💖

In this new video out in the bush, Adine and carer, Khensani join the carers on day duty with the elephant herd.

Khensani, as a junior nursery carer, spends most of her time at work at the orphanage while the elephants are out in the day, or while Khanyisa is in the nursery in the evenings and early mornings. Khensani, together with Reply, takes care of a bunch of vital tasks, including preparing milk bottles, keeping Khanyisa company, monitoring her health, sleeping habits, dung and urine, as well cleaning the nursery and kitchen and providing fresh bana grass and lucerne each day.

Khanyisa is a little fussy on this day out in the reserve and Adine helps with the milk bottle feedings. Khanyisa has days when she slurps up her milk quickly and days when she is a little fussier. As she continues to grow and we have to adjust her milk formula to suit her changing needs, sometimes she also takes time to adjust to increases in milk and certain ingredients, like protein and oil.

Tokwe, Kumbura and Lundi are all close by Khanyisa's side here, with Tokwe especially right beside her as the two elephants strip bark from the trees. These wanderers of the African plains and forests prefer a diet of lush green grasses with occasional fruity snacks that are available during the warm wet season, however for much of the year less nutritious stems, roots and bark are consumed. In other words they graze during the wet season and browse during the dry season when up to 94% of their diet consists of indigestible and difficult to swallow material.

Fortunately, their giant molars are perfect for grinding the bark and stems into a more manageable, and ultimately, a more swallowable state. Unlike giraffes, who use their prehensile blue tongues to grasp delicious leaves from far out of reach places, African elephants cannot stick their tongues out at you because the underside is connected to the floor of the mouth.

The tongue, which can weigh up to 12 kilograms, aids in moving food to the back of the throat where, mixed with saliva, it is easily slid down the mucous-lined oesophagus into a simple one chamber stomach.

African elephants are herbivorous, generalised feeders and their digestive strategy requires them to consume large amounts of low quality forage. They feed for up to 18 hours a day and depending on the quality of the food can digest as little as 22% of that with the remainder being excreted.

African elephants, along with all vertebrates, are unable to digest the major component of the cell walls of plants which is cellulose and therefore many rely on anaerobic microbes or gut bacteria to, through fermentation, convert their forage into a digestible form.

Elephants are hind-gut fermenters, which means that the fermentation necessary to convert the branches, stems and bark into absorbable and nutritious sludge takes place, not in the stomach, which acts mainly as a storage container, but in the large colon and caecum. Hind-gut fermentation has the benefit of allowing animals to survive on large amounts of low-quality forage which they process more rapidly than would be possible for a similarly sized ruminant.

The largest of all land animals, the African elephant, consumes over 150kg of assorted plant material per day.

Read more in our blog:
https://herd.org.za/it-takes-guts-to-...