2023-11-11 23:29:14
NEW YORK — In 1981, a long drought devastated Namibia, wiping out most pastoral animals — except elephants.
Guided by the memory of their matriarchs, large herds reached water sources. In addition to remembering the location of places visited years before, the largest land mammals are capable of walking up to 30 miles to quench their thirst.
This is one of the stories told in the exhibition The Secret World of Elephantswhich starts tomorrow here at the Natural History Museum.
Over 60 million years, 200 types of elephants roamed the world. Today, only three remain: those from the African savannas, the African forests, and the Asian elephants.
“In our literature, elephants are good characters with whom we have a real connection,” says exhibition director Lauri Halderman. “However, especially in Western cultures, we have few individual experiences with them beyond zoos and characters like Dumbo or Manny the mammoth. The ice Age. This fascination with elephants is the starting point for this exhibition.”
The exhibition, which took two years to produce, explores the evolution of elephants and their biological relatives. To this end, it brings original-size reproductions of the animals, films, texts, digital stations, a statue of the Hindu god Ganesh, who has the body of a man and the head of an elephant, and the reminder that these animals are illegally hunted for the value of their leather and ivory.
“There is a limit to what you can do in a museum, but here a visitor can see everything three-dimensionally, unlike a television viewer. This is a qualitative difference that continues to attract audiences to natural history museums,” says Ross MacPhee, the curator emeritus of the museum’s Department of Mammals.
This idea becomes clear when the visitor comes across a display of 500 cans that together add up to 200 liters – the amount an elephant consumes daily. They are capable of storing eight liters at a time in their trunks and a few more liters in a pharyngeal pouch that serves as a canteen so that they can hydrate themselves while searching for the next water reservoir.
The superlatives don’t end there.
Elephants defecate up to 110 kilograms/day, following devouring between 136 and 226 kilograms of food. The trunks have 40 thousand muscles. A pregnancy lasts almost two years, the longest in the animal world.
One station in the show says that elephants’ feet are able to hear vibrations and communicate with each other. The vibrations start in the throat, travel to the legs and reach the ground traveling long distances before reaching other elephants. They are felt by the ultra-sensitive soles of the feet, and from there they are carried to the ears.
Despite their size, elephants love it too.
During their growth, calves spend years at their mothers’ side, and younger female elephants care for the baby elephants to practice parenting. Those who grew up together recognize each other’s voices from a distance, and run to see each other and hug each other – with their trunks. They watch over their dead, and also show solidarity with the sick and stressed, bringing food and caring for them – also with their trunks.
Elephants belong to the proboscidean group, which comes from the word ‘proboscis’, which means nose and trunk. They circulated throughout the planet, except for Antarctica and Australia, and over thousands of years many became “dwarfs” when they landed on islands in the Pacific and Mediterranean.
In the exhibition, there is a reproduction of a baby mammoth shedding its winter fur. Just over a meter tall, he lived in what is now Sicily, and became the curator’s pet. “The president of the museum missed a huge commercial opportunity by not turning it into a stuffed animal,” he jokes.
During the ice age, which began around 2 million years ago and ended almost 12,000 years ago, there were five families of elephants, only one of which — the gomphoterans — roamed Latin America. These five families were home to around 50 species. At the end of that era, however, they began to disappear — of the 50 species, only three remain. Their future depends on planning, responsible tourism and sanctuaries.
“It is now believed that all of these losses are in some way linked to climate change or our tendency to disastrously modify the environments in which we live,” says MacPhee. “We know that most of them disappeared in relatively short periods of time and when Homo sapiens already existed on the planet. But this is still a very active area of investigation.”
Tania Menai
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