Elephants run

If you’re looking for the most interesting animal facts, you’re at the right place. Here areamazing facts about elephants for kids: Can elephants run?

A charging elephant might not look like it's merely walking, but that's exactly what it may be doing. Surprisingly, scientists don't agree on whether elephants run in the traditional sense. Now a new study splits the difference, suggesting that a rushing elephant may be walking and running at the same time.

Elephants break all the rules of animal movement. Most four-legged vertebrates change their stride when they move at high speeds so that all four feet leave the ground at once. Elephants take faster and longer steps, but they never take all four feet off the ground. That helps them spread out their massive weight as much as possible, says Norman Heglund, a biomechanics expert at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium. But then, are they really running?

That's been a tough question to answer. It turns out there's a lot more involved in running than just taking one's feet off the ground. The legs also flex in particular ways that change an animal's center of gravity and the force it exerts on the ground. Scientists can measure these changes in humans and other animals by making them walk across force sensing plates. But just try doing that with a 4000-kilogram elephant.

The closest researchers have come is high-speed video of rushing elephants analyzed by a team of researchers in 2003. John Hutchinson, a biologist of the University of London's Royal Veterinary College, and colleagues concluded from the footage that, when elephants move at high speeds, their back legs bend slightly, like a runner springing from step to step. But scientists wanted to see more quantitative data.

So in the new study, Heglund and colleagues engineered a heavy-duty force-sensing plate that could withstand being trampled by a charging elephant. They shipped sixteen of the plates, along with computers and video cameras to the Thai Elephant Conservation Center in Lampang Province. There, they constructed a 2 meter by 8 meter track from the plates and filmed 34 elephants, each guided by a mounted trainer, as they traversed the track at a range of speeds.
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Despite their size, elephants step lightly, the team reports today in The Journal of Experimental Biology. A human runner exerts peak forces of 3 times his or her body weight when running, while elephants exert at most 1.4 times their body weight. They also don't move their center of gravity much: Even at an 18 kilometer-per-hour charge, an elephant's center of mass moves up and down by about a centimeter, a smaller vertical movement than human runners make.

As to whether elephants actually run, the answer seems to be, well, sort of. While Hutchinson's team saw that an elephants' front legs walked while the back legs trotted, Heglund's team's measurements indicated the opposite: When stepping with a forelimb, the elephants' center of mass lowered slightly as the force on the ground increased, indicating a spring-like mechanism typical of a dog or a human's run. Meanwhile, even at high speeds, the elephants' back legs seemed to stay rigid, which is typical of a walk. "They don't really run in the classical sense," Heglund says. "They can't quite kick it into second gear, so they're stuck halfway in between" a walk and a run.

But that may not be the final answer, warns Hutchinson, who studied the same group of elephants alongside Heglund's team. He says that the elephants' feet likely touched more than one plate at once, making it hard to separate what individual limbs were doing. Still, he says, the research is important because it quantifies the forces with which elephants hit the ground. "It's nice to have the numbers."

If nothing else, the study illustrates that, when it comes to running in animals, "it's not one size fits all," says Daniel Schmitt, an expert in primate locomotion at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. "That speaks to how evolution works."

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Percentage similarity between humans and animals in of genetic

Here is one of the most amazing science facts: Percentage similarity between humans and animals in of genetic 

It is very difficult to find reliable data comparing the human genome to animal genome. The principal reason is that few animals have had their full genome sequenced. Even those that have cannot be easily compared in terms of percentages because the genomic length and chromosomal division can vary greatly from one species to another.

Scouring the Web, here is what I have found so far.

- Genome-wide variation from one human being to another can be up to 0.5% (99.5% similarity)

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- Chimpanzees are 96% to 98% similar to humans, depending on how it is calculated.

- Cats have 90% of homologous genes with humans, 82% with dogs, 80% with cows, 79% with chimpanzees, 69% with rats and 67% with mice. 

- Cows (Bos taurus) are 80% genetically similar to humans.

- 75% of mouse genes have equivalents in humans (source), 90% of the mouse genome could be lined up with a region on the human genome (source) 99% of mouse genes turn out to have analogues in humans 

- The fruit fly (Drosophila) shares about 60% of its DNA with humans.

- About 60% of chicken genes correspond to a similar human gene.

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Amazing Facts On Elephants

Would you like to see some elephant facts in your freetime? I believe that these following facts will be interested to you:

1. An elephant is one of the few four legged animals, which cannot run or jump.
2. At birth, the baby elephants are blind and they depend on their trunk and their mothers to help them.
3. Females can mate and have babies until they are around 50 years old, and they tend to give birth every 2.5 to 4 years.
4. Elephants feed around 16 hours a day and they consume around 300 to 600 pounds of vegetation every day.
5. Male elephants go through bouts of aggression, which last for short periods.  Hence, female elephants are kept at the zoos and used in the circus, as they are gentler in nature.
6. Elephants are social animals and they are often seen touching and caressing one another and playing around with the trunks.
7. An elephants tusk grows up to around 10 feet and weighs around 200 pounds.
8. There are two recognised species (types) of elephants the African elephant and the Asian elephant. The Indian elephant is a sub species of the Asian elephant. Elephants live in areas of Africa, Southern and Southeast Asia
9. The elephant is the national animal of Thailand.
10. A newborn elephant is able to stand up on its feet very soon after it’s born.
11. An elephant’s trunk has more than 40,000 muscles in it and no bones, which give it the flexibility. However, the trunk can get very heavy at times. So, the elephants are seen to rest it on their tusk.
12. Elephants consume around 15 quarts of water at a time.
13. As the elephants rely on one tusk more than the other, usually one tusk goes through the grinding leading to one being longer than the other.
14. Elephants use their trunks as a hose pipe by filling their trunks and then pouring the water in the mouth.
15. African and Asian elephants differ in several ways, but the variation in ears is commonly used to differentiate them. Some say that African species have ears that look like a map of Africa, and the Asian species have smaller ears that look like a map of India. Other differences include the body size, African elephants are much bigger and heavier, the skin is more wrinkled and tusks larger. The tip on the trunk of an African elephant has two prong like tips which are used to grasp objects whereas the Asian elephant has only one
16. Elephants walk behind each other in a single line when they are travelling.
17. An elephant poops around 80 pounds of feces in a day.
18. The elephant rests by raising one foot and crossing it behind the other one.
19. Just like dolphins and parrots, the elephant can also do mimicry. Some elephants in Kenya who were raised near the highway were heard to make truck sounds.
20. On an average, the elephant sleeps for around 2 hours in a day.

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Trunk helps an elephant access better quality food

Do you know what  trunk helps an elephant access better quality food? Let's see for much more amaing informaion!
The elephant got its trunk, the story goes, because one small elephant child was so curious as to what a hungry crocodile ate for dinner that he got too close to it. The crocodile then bit and pulled its bulgy nose and stretched it out.

From then on, the elephant child was able to stuff large bundles of grass into its mouth with ease.

The truth, of course, is likely to be different to Rudyard Kipling's elephant child story.

And now researchers have sought to understand exactly what that is; and establish why elephants and giraffes have such long trunks and tongues.

The answer lies with the amount of food they need to eat, a new study suggests. It's published in the journal Acta Zoologica.

A team modelled how the tongues and trunks of 18 species of herbivore related to the amount of food they took in while grazing.

The soft body parts – the lips tongues and trunks - are the key to their survival

The elephant's trunk, they found, was vital for it to eat enough food in relation to the size of its mouth. So too was the giraffe's tongue. They also helped the herbivores eat softer, more nutritious plants such as leaves.

The team used a modelling process called allometric scaling, a well-known biological "law" which states that the size of an animal is in proportion to how much it eats.

How much they can bite in one go (bite volume) is therefore a direct result of these elongated soft mouth parts. Smaller herbivores such as an antelope do not need a large tongue to eat enough food.

Not only are these structures key to the survival of today's elephants and giraffes, the team further proposes that they evolved as a direct adaptation to the quality of edible plants in their environment.

It may also explain why some larger herbivores went extinct, says de Boer. During times of sudden climate change, when food became scarcer or less nutritious, other species may have lacked suitable tongues or trunks to eat enough food to survive.

However, as soft tissue is not preserved in the fossil record, other researchers maintain there's more to how tongues and trunks developed.

Palaeontologist William Sanders from the University of Michigan, US, is not convinced that this new analysis answers other aspects of herbivore development which could have played equally important roles in tongue and trunk evolution.

The size of an animal's teeth, how it replaces them in its mouth, and how an animal's guts work, would all influence how it eats, and have an impact on the evolution of trunks or tongues.

"Skulls, faces and mouths are formed of interrelated anatomical complexes, and that evolution of one part of these complexes will almost always have an effect on the others," he says.

About eight million years ago, elephant ancestors relied heavily on grazing from the ground but they had two sets of elongated tusks which prevented them from eating with only their mouths.

The elephant trunk, he says, evolved to such a length to accommodate its large tusks.

So in one aspect of his story Kipling was not so far off after all. The elephant child certainly could eat more with its elongated trunk as can all other elephants alive today.

Some awesome Bengal tiger facts

 Here are some interesting tiger facts for you:

The Bengal Tiger is one of the largest species of tigers in the world. They are also the one that offers the highest number of them in the wild. Don’t get to excited though as they are still at a high risk of being endangered. There are only about 2,500 of them in the wild.

What is also interesting is that there is about 1% which are DNA verified hybrids. They have one parent that is a Bengal Tiger and one that is a Siberian Tiger. These hybrid tigers seem to do quite well in the wild with most of the males being sterile. It is believed that this genetic link though was the result of mistakes in breeding while in captivity and then released to the wild instead of a natural occurrence that takes place in the wild. You may find many similarities between the Bengal Tiger and the Siberian Tiger.

The biggest threat to the in India is that their natural habitat continues to be cut away by logging companies. As a result they struggle to survive in less area and with less prey to feed upon. Finding enough water is a common problem for them as well. This is because the former is a subspecies off the latter.

This particular species of tiger can weigh up to 500 pounds for a full grown male and about 310 pounds for a full grown female. They also feature very long tails and heads that are larger than that of other species. They are excellent hunters and feed on a variety of prey found around India. They include deer, antelope, hogs and buffalo. They have also been seen consuming monkeys, birds, and other small prey when their main food selections become scarce.

In some areas there has been a problem with the Bengal Tiger eating livestock as well. Humans continue to try to live in these areas that used to be home to the tigers. Then they wonder why the animals they are raising become meals for them. Many of these ranchers engage in the illegal killing of tigers too so that they can protect their investment in such livestock.

There have also been reports of the Bengal Tiger killing and eating humans. However, most tigers avoid humans and this doesn’t happen regularly. They tend to consume up to 60 pounds of food at one time.

It is estimated that less than 2,500 of the Bengal tigers remain at this time. This is less than half of what the population was just 10 years ago. As a result there is a very aggressive protection plan in place for them. The efforts are working to an extent but poaching of these tigers is still a huge concern.

The Wildlife Protection Society of India continues to strive to look into all allegations of tiger poaching. They have confiscated large amounts of tiger parts and pelts but it is often hard for them to get to the source of who is actually responsible for killing and for shipping them. Even though they detain those caught with them there are more people involved in the process than they are able to uncover.

To get away with poaching though many of these hunters have resorted to poisoning the tigers. Then they are found already dead and they can’t be held responsible for killing them. This is also the same practices that many of the ranchers engage in as well.