Species profile
Loxodonta africana
African savanna elephant
This is a curated published estimate, not a live census. Estimates may refer to mature individuals, wild individuals or a documented range and are not directly comparable between species.
EN · Endangered — Endangered — very high risk of extinction in the wild
About this species
African savanna elephant (Loxodonta africana) is part of the curated SpeciesWatch catalogue and is classified as Endangered. African elephants recognise dozens of individuals by voice, greet each other with rumbles that travel for kilometres, and mourn their dead. Its recorded population direction is decreasing, so the category needs to be read alongside continuing losses of individuals or local populations.
Habitat, behaviour and ecological role
This profile associates the species with terrestrial, savanna. These labels summarise environments used during different stages of its life rather than drawing an exact range boundary. An elephant's trunk holds around 40,000 muscles — it can lift a tree or pick up a single seed, and elephants even use it as a snorkel when swimming. Its anatomy and behaviour are responses to those environments, while movement can connect distant places requiring different forms of management.
Why this species is at risk
Elephants are keystone engineers: by digging waterholes and opening forest clearings they shape entire ecosystems that hundreds of other species depend on. The catalogue records 3 principal pressures for this profile: Ivory poaching, Habitat loss, Human-elephant conflict. They should not be treated as isolated causes. Habitat change, exploitation, pollution, disease and climate stress can reinforce one another, while the importance of each pressure varies between regions and through time.
Conservation outlook
Protecting and reconnecting habitat is a priority, together with infrastructure planning that keeps feeding, breeding or migration routes functional. Direct protection needs to combine enforcement with conflict prevention, demand reduction and local benefits that make coexistence viable. Actions need long-term monitoring and revision as evidence changes; a positive intervention in one place does not by itself represent recovery across the species.
Editorial review: 2026-08-21
Threat factors
Known occurrences
Dots are georeferenced occurrence records from OBIS (marine) and GBIF (global), not individual animals and not a complete range map. Up to 500 recent API results are cached; the profile renders at most 500 points.
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Listen to this species
Hwange National Park, Matabeleland North Province · 1:54 · https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/