African elephants are found widely in Sub-Saharan Africa, in dense forests, mopane and miombo woodlands, Sahelian scrub, or deserts.
African elephant societies are arranged around family units. Each family unit is made up of around ten closely related females and their calves and is led by an older female known as the matriarch. When separate family units bond, they form kinship or bond groups. After puberty, male elephants tend to form close alliances with other males. While females are the most active members of African elephant societies, both male and female elephants are capable of distinguishing between hundreds of different low frequency infrasonic calls to communicate with and identify each other.
African elephants are highly intelligent, and they have a very large and highly convoluted neocortex, a trait they share with humans, apes and some dolphin species. They are amongst the world’s most intelligent species. With a mass of just over 5 kg (11 lb), elephant brains are larger than those of any other land animal, and although the largest whales have body masses twentyfold those of a typical elephant, whale brains are barely twice the mass of an elephant’s brain. The elephant’s brain is similar to that of humans in terms of structure and complexity. For example, the elephant’s cortex has as many neurons as that of a human brain.
