Sumatran Elephant Facts

Sumatran Elephant Profile

Since our species gained self-awareness, we’ve been trying to justify our delusions of grandeur by looking for what makes us stand out from other species. First, it was tools – but it turns out even birds can make those. Then, it was language, but sperm whales were talking for 15 million years before we learned to. Then, emotional connections, mirrors, houses, and currency would all be debunked as unique to humans, too.

But there’s one thing we commonly overlook that truly does make us different from “The animals”, and that’s our unrelenting drive to extinct everything around us. And sadly, today’s topic is a victim of precisely this defining characteristic: The Critically endangered Sumatran Elephant.

Sumatran Elephant Facts Overview

Interesting Sumatran Elephant Facts

The Sumatran elephant is a subspecies of the charismatic Asian elephant, confined to an enormous Indonesian island, yet with a preference for habitats that bring it into direct competition with humans. And, we are nothing if not competitive.

This intelligent, gentle and mysterious, ancient megabeast is on the verge of disappearing forever, but thankfully, there are some very dedicated and passionate groups working against this.

1. They’re a subspecies

The Indian and African elephants are not all that related. They appear to have diverged more than 7 million years ago, when a branch of the elephant line went into Eurasia as mammoths and another branch stayed in Africa to become the two species we have there now (and some would stomp around Eurasia, too, as the enormous Palaeoloxodon).

Around 6.7 million years ago, the mammoth branch separated again, this time to produce what would become the Asian elephants, making Asian elephants closer relatives of mammoths than of extant African elephants.

Various populations of the Asian elephant found their way to the Southeast Asian islands, either by swimming while they were still very close together still, or by walking, before the oceans rose to cut them off. And there they have remained, isolated for long enough to now be considered subspecies.

India, Borneo, Nepal and Sumatra each have their own subspecies, and the Sumatran is the littlest. ¹

2.  They’re the smallest

Elephants are the largest megaherbivores left, and remain some of the largest mammals that ever walked the Earth. The African elephants can reach 11 tonnes and four metres tall in exceptional circumstances, and the largest of the extinct species would have topped out at a metre taller than this, at least.

Today, the smallest species is the Indian elephant, and the smallest subspecies is this one, the Sumatran elephant. Male Indian elephants average around four tonnes, and just under three metres tall, which is more or less the upper bound for the Sumatran elephant, which averages around 2.5 metres tall and three tonnes.

These are the smallest extant elephants, but they are just as graceful, long-lived and gentle as you’d expect from any of the larger species.  

3. They live a long time

Being the smallest elephant is a bit like being the healthiest Texan, and so Sumatran elephants still get through around 150kg of foliage per day and can drop a deuce that weighs as much as the average Indonesian adult.

This large animal can live at least 60 years in the wild, and upwards of 75 years in captivity, making it on par with humans in terms of longevity.

And, like all elephants, they’re emotionally intelligent, social and talk through their feet. ²

4. They talk

Elephants make a lot of sounds we can hear: rumblings, trumpetings, growling, and so on, but there is a whole hidden world of elephant communication that exists beneath our audible threshold, in the infrasound spectrum.

These vocalisations travel through the ground, sometimes up to 5 km or more, and are only recently being identified as a vocal language.

Researchers have now confirmed that African elephants use names and other “words” in their language – something that is by no means unique to mammalian communication and has also been confirmed in whales.

Asian elephant communication is less studied, but they, too, use infrasonic communication, and it’s a reasonable assumption to make that they also have a sophisticated language. Asian elephant infrasonic calls are slightly lower in frequency than those of the African elephants, but quieter. ³

5. They like the lowlands

Sumatra is home to some of the most ancient forests we still have around us, and, being an island, many of its inhabitants are entirely unique, too.

2.5 million hectares of this rainforest are now protected as UNESCO heritage sites, which is a big deal, though, as American politics has recently demonstrated, laws are merely agreements that can be freely ignored unless there are consequences for breaking them, and illegal logging is rife across these sites due to a lack of enforcement.

UNESCO’s 25 million hectares is now on the Danger-List for this reason, and the most at-risk locations are the ones that people can reach more easily, which in this case is the lowland rainforest.

This lowland forest habitat happens to be exactly the preferred living condition of the Sumatran elephant, and so the subspecies is threatened on all sides by habitat destruction, fragmentation, and direct persecution by poaching.

But worse still, those protected areas are a fraction of the elephant’s habitat, and in fact, around 85% of this species lives in unprotected forest, which puts them at even greater risk. As with all elephants, their tusks are coveted by people with no place in a civilised society. ⁴

6. They’re Almost Dead

To give some perspective, the African bush elephant is listed as Endangered, with population estimates hovering around half a million, but in decline. The far rarer and Critically Endangered African Forest Elephant has collapsed in number by up to 90% in recent decades, and now numbers somewhere around 130,000 individuals. ⁵

The Asian elephant is thought to comprise around 50,000 individuals in total, and the Sumatran subspecies makes up just a thousand or so, perhaps as few as 700.

Conversion of their habitats into agriculture and settlement for humans has seen elephants removed and/or killed, and their population is said to have dropped by at least 69% in a single generation as a result.

Poisonings and electrocutions result from crop raiding incidents among farmers, and these are so rife that the subspecies is now on the brink of total extinction. But there is still hope.

7. Conservation efforts

Human-wildlife conflict is a huge problem for elephants of all kinds, and as habitats are replaced with human crop planting, food in the forest becomes scarce while food around humans increases. This naturally brings elephants out of the forest and into contact with farmers, for whom the elephants become a threat to their lives and livelihoods.

Reducing this conflict is a very useful focus for conservationists, and orgs like the Wildlife Conservation Society Indonesia have reported that by focusing on village initiatives to mitigate conflict, as well as the pursuit of poachers in general, they have stabilised local elephant populations, and perhaps even contributed to their increase.

So, people are trying to, and possibly succeeding in, protecting these animals, and with more exposure and support, the subspecies shouldn’t be written off just yet. ^{6 7}

Sumatran Elephant Fact-File Summary

Scientific Classification

1. Rohland et.al (2007), “Proboscidean Mitogenomics: Chronology and Mode of Elephant Evolution Using Mastodon as Outgroup”, National Library of Medicine.
2. Sukumar et. al (1993), “Asian elephant in Sumatra Population and Habitat Viability Analysis”,.
3. Payne et. al (1986), “Infrasonic calls of the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus)”, Springer Nature Link.
4. , “Tropical Rainforest Heritage of Sumatra”,UNESCO.
5. (2011), “Sumatran Elephant”, IUCN Red List.
6. (2024), “Critically endangered Sumatran elephant calf born in Indonesia”, PHYS ORG.
7. , “Sumatran Elephant ”, WCS INDONESIA.