Do Asian Elephants Have Tusks? Tuskers, Tushes and Makhnas

Which Asian elephants have tusks?

In the Asian elephant, tusks are a mostly male feature. A bull with visible ivory is a tusker, and one without is a makhna. Females, by contrast, are almost always tuskless in the usual sense. Unlike African elephants, where most cows grow tusks, it is rare to see an Asian cow with ivory long enough to notice from a distance.

The share of tuskers among males varies a lot from place to place:

In Sri Lanka, the share of tuskers is commonly estimated at fewer than 10% of bulls, often quoted at around 7%. In parts of southern India, most adult bulls were historically tuskers, while populations in northeastern India and Southeast Asia have a higher share of makhnas. Researchers still debate how much of this pattern is natural and how much reflects centuries of hunting.

What are tushes?

Tushes are short upper incisors found in female Asian elephants and in some makhnas. They grow only a few centimeters beyond the lip and are often hidden, visible only when the elephant opens its mouth or lifts its trunk. Tushes are made of the same ivory as tusks but stay small.

Because tushes are easy to miss, many people assume all female Asian elephants have no teeth at the front of the mouth. In fact, the difference between a tush and a tusk is one of degree, not of kind.

What are elephant tusks made of?

Elephant tusks are enlarged upper incisor teeth. They are made mostly of dentine, the material known as ivory, with a thin layer of enamel at the tip that soon wears away. Roughly a third of a tusk sits inside the skull, around a living pulp cavity full of nerves and blood vessels.

Tusks keep growing throughout an elephant’s life, so the longest ones belong to old bulls. The longest Asian elephant tusk on record measured about 3.26 m (10.7 ft), and the heaviest weighed about 73 kg (161 lb). African bush elephant tusks get bigger still; see African bush elephant for details.

Like people who are right- or left-handed, elephants often favor one tusk, which then wears down faster and becomes shorter and more rounded at the tip.

What do elephants use their tusks for?

Tuskers use their ivory as tools and weapons:

• Digging for water, roots and mineral-rich soil.
• Stripping bark from trees and prying apart branches.
• Moving objects such as logs and fallen trees.
• Fighting and display. Bulls clash during contests over females, especially in musth, and large tusks signal strength.
• Resting the trunk. Elephants sometimes drape the heavy trunk over a tusk.

Makhnas do without all of this and seem to cope well. They use their trunk, feet and body weight instead, and mahouts have long said that makhnas tend to be heavier and more powerful in the trunk and neck than tuskers of the same age. Makhnas also father calves, so tusks are not essential for breeding.

How poaching changes tusks

Tusks are what poachers want, and killing only the tuskers has a strong effect on the next generation. In parts of southern India, ivory poaching in the 1970s to 1990s removed so many tuskers that some reserves were left with very few adult males. In Periyar Tiger Reserve in Kerala, for example, surveys in the late 1990s reported only around one adult male for every 100 or more adult females. Because makhnas survive while tuskers are shot, a population can slowly shift toward fewer tusks.

The clearest evidence comes from Africa. During the civil war in Mozambique (1977–1992), elephants in Gorongosa National Park were heavily hunted for ivory. A 2021 study in Science found that tusklessness among females rose from roughly 18.5% before the war to about 51% among the females that survived it. The trait is inherited through the X chromosome and appears to be fatal to male embryos, which is why tuskless African elephants are almost all female.

This is a rapid evolutionary change caused by people. Losing tusks also affects how elephants feed and shape their habitat, because they strip less bark and break fewer trees.

Tusks in Asian vs African elephants

The difference in tusks is one of the easiest ways to tell the two kinds of elephant apart:

• Asian elephants: mostly males have tusks; females have tushes or none; many tuskless males.
• African elephants: most males and most females have tusks, although tuskless individuals are becoming more common where poaching has been heavy.

For a full comparison of ears, heads, backs and trunks, see African vs Asian elephant. For the wider picture of ivory poaching and habitat loss, see Are elephants endangered?.