What are the biggest cave-dwelling animals?

If someone asked you to name the biggest animal that lives in caves, what would you say? A large bat? A sleeping bear? Not even close! The largest cave-dwelling animals are the Kitum Cave elephants of Mount Elgon in Kenya!

The elephants live around the slopes of Mount Elgon, an extinct volcano in Kenya. Unlike the other African Elephants that live on the savannah, these elephants are in the middle of a rainforest. There are plenty of plants there for them to eat, but there’s one big problem with them: the plants are missing salt. So much rain falls in the forest that it washes the salt from the soil and plants.

This is a big problem, because elephants need 100g of salt each day just to keep their bodies going. So where do they find it?

The answer is in a series of caves deep within the mountain, where the elephants go to mine their own salt from the walls. They go at night, and it’s pitch black within the caves, but the elephants know the way by heart and teach it to their babies.

To get the salt out of the walls, the elephants have to scrape it out with their tusks – that’s why the cave elephants have much shorter tusks than their cousins that live on the savannah. While the salt mines were first created by the volcano, there are signs that the elephants have been changing the shape of the walls through years of mining the salt!