Lucy is an Asian elephant. You can easily identify an Asian elephant by its smaller, rounded ears. By contrast, an African elephant’s ears actually resemble the outline of the continent of Africa. Another distinguishing factor among Asians is a bump on their forehead.
The African elephant is the largest land animal on Earth and the Asian elephant is slightly smaller. The height of an African elephant (at the shoulder) can range from 2.5 to 4 m (8.2 to 13 ft) and the Asian range is 2 to 3 m (6.6 to 9.8ft).
Both use their trunks, which are like a very long nose, for smelling, breathing, trumpeting and drinking. The Asian elephants have a single fingerlike feature at the end of its trunk and the African has two. This helps them to pick up smaller objects. The trunk of an elephant has more than 100,000 different muscles; that’s more that the whole human body!
African elephants are also heavier ranging from 2,268 to 6,350 kg (5,000 to 14,000 lbs) and Asians from 2,041 to 4,999 kg (2.25 tons to 5.5 tons). They can eat up to 136 kilograms (300 lbs) of food each day.
While Asian elephants have been domesticated for thousands of years, African elephants are not easily domesticated.
Longevity
Why it important for elephants to be in zoos.
Elephants, maintained in keeping with zoo accreditation standards, do well in zoological environments. As with all of the living species, eventually all of the elephants in zoo care will die. Longevity studies show that elephants have long life-spans in such environments. Elephants in zoos live as long as those elephants in protected areas and certainly longer than those in unprotected regions. Unfortunately wild elephant populations have been decimated by poaching for ivory and few populations exist that have older elephants. What we can say is that the population of elephants currently living in North American zoos is largely a geriatric community and we do not tend to see such elderly elephants in wild populations.
The life span of an elephant
The science shows that elephants in accredited zoos are as long-lived as elephants in the wild. The average life expectancy for female Asian elephants in professionally-managed zoological facilities in North America is 44.8 years. An Asian elephant can live to be 65 years old, just like a human can live to be 120 - this is their potential lifespan. However, the proper measure of longevity is "average life expectancy". For a female Asian elephant, this is about 45, just as for humans it is about 75. Just like humans, some elephants live less than the average, and some live longer. There is no evidence of any longevity difference between North American zoo and the wild populations, and this is one important measure of the excellent care they receive.