What Do Elephants Eat? How Much Food and Water They Need

What do elephants eat in the wild?

Elephants are mixed feeders. They graze on grasses and sedges near the ground and browse on leaves, twigs and shoots from bushes and trees. They also eat bark, roots, bulbs, seed pods, flowers and fruit when they are available. An elephant’s diet can include well over 100 plant species.

What they eat changes with the seasons. In the wet season, when fresh grass is plentiful, many elephants eat mostly grass. In the dry season, when grass becomes dry and poor, they switch to woody plants, stripping bark, digging up roots and pulling down branches. The African bush elephant can range from almost pure grazing to almost pure browsing depending on where it lives and the time of year.

What do African and Asian elephants eat?

African bush elephants feed on grasses, acacia and mopane trees, baobab bark and many shrubs. They readily push over small trees to reach the leaves at the top or the roots below. African forest elephants eat much more fruit, along with leaves and bark; one review recorded them feeding on at least 96 plant species.

The Asian elephant eats grasses, bamboo, palms, leaves, bark, roots and fruit such as wild figs and wood apple. In many areas, Asian elephants also raid crops such as rice, sugarcane and bananas, which brings them into conflict with farmers.

How much do elephants eat and drink?

An adult elephant usually eats 100–150 kg (220–330 lb) of food a day, and large bulls may eat even more. Elephants have a simple stomach and ferment their food in a huge hindgut, which is fast but not very efficient: they digest less than half of what they swallow. To make up for this, they eat a lot and almost constantly.

Water is just as important. An adult African bush elephant typically drinks about 150–230 liters (40–60 US gal) a day, and on hot days it may drink a large share of that in one visit to a river or waterhole. In dry riverbeds, elephants dig holes with their feet, trunks and tusks to reach water below the sand. Elephants can go a few days without drinking when they must, for example the desert-adapted elephants of Namibia, but most stay within reach of water.

How do elephants eat?

The trunk is the elephant’s main feeding tool. It can wrap around a bundle of grass and pull it up, strip leaves from a branch, or pluck a single fruit with its tip. African elephants have two finger-like points at the trunk tip, while Asian elephants have one and rely more on wrapping the trunk around food. To drink, an elephant sucks water partway up its trunk and then squirts it into its mouth. Learn more in How do elephants use their trunks?

Tusks help too. Elephants use them to strip bark, dig for roots and water, and break branches. Food is ground down by huge, ridged molars. An elephant has only one large molar in use in each half of each jaw at a time, and these wear down and are replaced several times during its life.

Why do elephants eat soil and salt?

Plants are low in sodium and some other minerals, so elephants seek them out. They visit salt licks, eat mineral-rich soil, chew on termite mound earth and have been seen eating wood ash. On Mount Elgon, on the border of Kenya and Uganda, elephants walk deep into caves to scrape salty rock from the walls with their tusks.

Why does an elephant’s diet matter for nature?

Because they eat so much, elephants shape the places where they live. By breaking and uprooting trees they open up woodland, which can help grasses and grazing animals but can also reduce trees in areas with too many elephants. The water holes they dig and enlarge are used by many other animals.

Elephants are also important seed dispersers. Seeds pass through their gut and are dropped, often kilometers away, in a pile of fertilizing dung. Forest elephants spread the seeds of many rainforest trees this way, and some large-seeded trees depend on them. Elephant dung also feeds dung beetles and other animals.

Do elephants eat meat or peanuts?

Elephants never hunt or eat animals. The popular image of elephants loving peanuts comes from circuses and zoos, not from the wild.