Witnessing the Great Desert Elephants | Secrets of the Elephants

2m read

·Nov 10, 2024

Somehow these elephants are eking out a living in a landscape that anyone else would think is lifeless. Conservationist Dr. Paula Kahumbu has spent her career studying the elephants of Africa's lush savanna grasslands. But she's never laid eyes on a desert elephant. She wants to find out how these remarkable animals managed to survive in this unforgiving place.

African savanna elephants and desert elephants are the same species. But if you took a savanna elephant and brought it here, it wouldn't survive. I want to know how these desert elephants managed to live here. To find one of the constantly roaming elephant herds, Paula has turned to tracker Hendrik Moon in Bomi and his 25 years of studying the Desert Elephant.

"I think some walk through a soft, so it's possible we’ll find them today."

"Oh, this amazing, there’s two here."

"Oh, you mean there's a big family here? Yeah. These are the desert elephants we've been looking for."

"This family. I've been watching elephants my whole life, and I've never seen elephants like these."

They may be the same species as savanna elephants, but you can immediately see the differences. The legs have less fat in them, so they look taller and their skin is looser.

It's incredibly tough for an elephant here. Food and water are both scarce and it's only getting worse in the Namib desert. Climate change has brought with it a five-year drought. Everything depends on their ability to get from one waterhole to the next. There's no time to stop, to investigate, to explore how to play. It's just survive. Survive means keep going. Keep going.

Where Is The U.S Dollar Heading? | Stansberry Research

The Beginning of Everything -- The Big Bang

View All

What You Do Counts | Podcast | Overheard at National Geographic

Foreign hey there it’s Amy. Today we’ve got something special for you. We’ve invited our Nachio colleague and Reporting resident Jordan Salama to guest host overheard. He’s going to introduce us to a 22-year-old climate activist and Nat Geo explorer who h…

Controlling a plane in space

Hello everyone! So I’m talking about how to find the tangent plane to a graph, and I think the first step of that is to just figure out how we control planes in three dimensions in the first place. What I have pictured here is a red dot representing a po…

Formal definition of partial derivatives

So I’ve talked about the partial derivative and how you compute it, how you interpret it in terms of graphs. But what I’d like to do here is give its formal definition. So it’s the kind of thing, just to remind you, that applies to a function that has a m…

Molecules Bumping Into One Another | Genius

Should I brew more? Still warm, and it’s been awhile. But the Law of Cooling is a decaying exponential. But you need a measurement on the liquid to get the heat transfer coefficient. Don’t worry about the measurement for now. We’ll find a new way to thin…

ENGLISH.

Hey, Vsauce Michael here, and today, we’re going to talk about this. What’s happening right now— the English language. A language spoken by more than a billion people with many, many different accents. And according to last year’s Harvard Google study, a …

Mixed number addition with regrouping

Let’s see if we can add five and two-fifths to three and four-fifths. Pause this video and see if you can figure out what this is. All right, now let’s do this together. We’ve had a little bit of practice adding mixed numbers in the past, and so one way …

Witnessing the Great Desert Elephants | Secrets of the Elephants

More Articles