Why do Elephants Have Such Big Ears?

Elephants are animals that definitely stand out above the crowd. They are the largest land animals, and they are famous for their useful trunks, which can be used for smelling, digging, communicating with other elephants, and picking up food and water. But trunks aside, two things that really make the elephant stand out are its massive flapping ears.

But why do elephants have such big ears?

Most people know that wooly mammoths, who lived in colder areas before they went extinct, looked like hairy elephants. But there’s one major difference: wooly mammoths had much smaller ears. So this tells us that the hot climate elephants live in is responsible for their massive ears.

Elephant ears are one sixth the size of an elephant’s body. That means if you were an elephant, your ears would be the size of your whole head. And they’re important because the bigger you are, the harder it is for you to cool down. Elephants are very big, so living in hot dry climates could be very dangerous for them without some way of cooling off quickly.

That’s where their ears come in. Elephants use their ears like fans to help create breezes, but their ears do more than that. Those big ears are just full of blood vessels. Warm blood from deep within the elephant’s body flows to the ears, where the blood vessels are very close to the skin and lose heat very easily. Elephants will even spray their ears with water to help them lose heat faster. This works so well that blood leaving an elephant’s ear is 9ºC cooler than it was when it entered the ear.

An elephant’s ears are its air conditioning!