How Elephants Cope With Heat

They don’t sweat, they don’t pant—yet they manage to survive temperatures of up to 40° Celsius

Asian elephants live in conditions of widely varying temperatures, but they do not sweat or pant to cool down, so their ability to cope with heat has always been something of a mystery. Researchers at Vienna’s Research Institute of Wildlife Ecology have found that Asian elephants have the ability to create a heat reservoir by lowering body temperatures at night and use this to increase their body temperatures during the day. It is a method previously only observed in small mammals such as rodents and bats, and in the case of desert mammals such as camels.

According to a press release, the researchers fed ‘small telemeters (allowing continuous recording of body temperature) to a group of captive elephants in Thailand and a control group at the Munich Zoo Hellabrunn to monitor temperatures in the animals’ gastrointestinal tract… Statistical analysis of the data confirmed the scientists’ expectations: the overall mean body temperature was similar in both the Thai and the German study groups, but fluctuations in body temperature were on average twice as large in the Thai animals as in the German individuals. The Thai animals had both a higher daily peak temperature and a lower minimum temperature, which the scientists related to the higher mean ambient temperatures in Thailand. In fact, the body temperature of the Thai elephants dropped at night to well below the normal average. This means that Thai elephants start the day with a much larger thermal reserve than their German counterparts.’

According to Thomas Ruf, co-author of the study, “The phenomenon of heterothermy as a thermoregulatory mechanism was known from desert animals such as camels, antelopes and small desert rodents, but it was surprising to find it in non-desert mammals. Our findings raise the intriguing possibility that heterothermy may be far more widespread in mammals than previously assumed.”

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