Learn about ELEPHANT DIGESTION with us! 🐘 Carer Godknows shares his wisdom as we look into the mouth of Jabulani and consider the inner workings of an elephant’s gut.
Elephants are not very good at digesting all the vegetation they eat.
These wanderers of the African plains and forests prefer a diet of lush green grasses with occasional fruity snacks that are available during the warm wet season, however for much of the year less nutritious stems, roots and bark are consumed. In other words they graze during the wet season and browse during the dry season when up to 94% of their diet consists of indigestible and difficult to swallow material.
The tongue, which can weigh up to 12 kilograms, aids in moving food to the back of the throat where, mixed with saliva, it is easily slid down the mucous-lined oesophagus into a simple one chamber stomach.
African elephants are generalised feeders and their digestive strategy requires them to consume large amounts of low quality forage. They feed for up to 18 hours a day and depending on the quality of the food can digest as little as 22% of that with the remainder being excreted.
African elephants, along with all vertebrates, are unable to digest the major component of the cell walls of plants which is cellulose and therefore many rely on anaerobic microbes or gut bacteria to, through fermentation, convert their forage into a digestible form.
Elephants are hind-gut fermenters, which means that the fermentation necessary to convert the branches, stems and bark into absorbable and nutritious sludge takes place, not in the stomach, which acts mainly as a storage container, but in the large colon and caecum.
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