Image courtesy of Muhammad Mahdi Karim, GFDL 1.2
Joel Kontinen
The ears of
African elephants (Loxodonta africana) can grow up to 2.01 metres
(or 6 feet 6 inches). That’s about 17% of their body length, which means
that while they’re the animal with the largest ears, they’re not actually the one
with the largest ears relative to the size of their body. That award goes to
the long-eared jerboa (Euchoreutes naso), but it's still impressive to
have 6-foot-tall ears. So why are elephants' ears so big? There's a practical reason for their large size, experts say.
An animal
that big generates a lot of heat, especially in the hot savannas, forests and
grasslands where they live. But unlike humans, elephants don't really
sweat, William Sanders, a vertebrate says. He is a paleontologist at the
University of Michigan who specializes in fossil elephants. Instead, they have
very little body hair and "spectacular cooling devices" — massive
ears filled with large blood vessels that help the giant animals
thermoregulate.
"When
the animal gets really warm, it can force blood into its ears, and then it'll
flap them," said Advait Jukar, an assistant curator of vertebrate
paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History. Elephant ears have thin
skin that is only millimetres thick and the blood vessels that pass
through them are large, enabling elephants to move about 20% of their blood
supply through their ears at any one time.
The larger
the ears are, the more surface area they have to release heat into the
surrounding air. Because the blood flowing through them is warmer than the air,
the heat dissipates into the elephant's surroundings. Cooler blood then
circulates back into the body, helping to reduce the animal's overall
temperature, Jukar told Live Science. The animals can expand or constrict
their blood vessels depending on whether it's cool or hot, which helps
regulate their temperature
Intelligentdesign has provided elephants with large ears so they will not get hot.
Source:
Sara Hashemi 2025 Why do elephants have big ears? | Live Science 17 May
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