ATLANTA — How much food and water do elephants consume in a day? What is its closest relative? Behold the power of its poop!
Fernbank Museum of Natural History recently unveiled its newest exhibit: The Secret World of Elephants.
“The big secret world is just how they communicate, how social they are, (and how they are) meeting up with other family groups,” Fernbank Museum of Natural History’s Cara Martinez told WSB-TV’s Nelson Hicks. “There’s so much about elephants that we’re still learning, and all that learning just helps us understand it better, to make the world better for them and us.”
The temporary exhibit explores the evolution of elephants, how they function, their role in society and how we interact with them.
In the United States, it’s unlikely you’ll ever encounter an elephant on your ride to school.
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But in other parts of the world...
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“Elephants are just sort of a fact of daily life. In some cases, this could be a good thing, like making paths for people to walk on through forests,” Martinez noted. “In other cases, though, it can be detrimental. Kids are sometimes afraid to go to school because elephants are crossing in the road. They can’t get there.”
Elephants drink about 50 gallons of water a day. You’d need to crack open and consume 528 soda cans’ worth of water every day to drink that much.
When they aren’t drinking, they’re eating 200 to 500 pounds of food every day.
And you know what that means...they poop a lot!
“We love poop here,” Martinez said. “We know that our guests love poop too. But elephant poop is extremely good for the environment. So we have elephant poop creating food for insects. The land there creates small microcosms of the ecosystem. Elephants are also forest creators. So when they eat all those nice veggies and fruits and poop out the seeds later, they’ve left it with good fertilizer in new areas. So they’ll actually help create forests by leaving behind their dung.”
Here’s something else that might surprise you: An elephant’s closest relatives include hyraxes—mammals that are typically one to two feet long and weigh four to 11 pounds—as well as manatees.
The exhibit concludes with a look at some famous elephants and money from around the world featuring the massive mammals.
“Elephants have long been seen as powerful, intelligent creatures, so they’ve been associated with strong leaders; they’ve been associated with royalty; they have been associated with warriors, and putting them on our money is kind of a way of showing that our government can be strong, things like that. It’s a very important symbol to those places, where they’re from,” Martinez said.
SPECIAL PROGRAMMING Fernbank After Dark on Nov. 13: Explore the weird, wonderful and downright unbelievable side of the animal kingdom with hands-on science, drinks and plenty of creatures worth talking about.
Check out The Secret World of Elephants at Fernbank Museum of Natural History now through Jan. 3.
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This story is sponsored by Fernbank Museum of Natural History.