In 1979, there were estimated to be 1.3 million elephants in Africa. By 1989, there were only 609,000 elephants left. At that rate, African elephants faced extintion within decades. Elephants once roamed the entire continent of Africa. Today the elephants' range has been reduced to less than one fourth of the continent.
Elephants tend to travel in family groups made up of mostly related females.
Adult males usually live in a separate herd. Adults reach eleven feet in height and weigh thousands of pounds. A large elephant may eat over three hundred pounds of food per day. Believed to be highly intelligent, elephants can communicate over long distances with subsonic rumbles,inaudible to human hearing. They are often observed exhibiting quite playful behavior in watering holes and rivers.