4 Things You Might Not Know About Elephants

August 12 is World Elephant Day, and wildlife lovers around the world are celebrating the world's largest living land animals. They're well worth celebrating. Formidably intelligent and gregarious, with complex societal structures based on tight-knit family bonds, elephants can remind us of our own best qualities.

But as popular as the big beasts are, there are a few things about elephants the average Californian might not know, from the threats facing the big beasts to just how many kinds of elephants there really are.

And there's one thing you might not know about elephants that might make it even more compelling to help save them.

How many elephant species are there?

If you went to school before 2000, or even afterward, you probably learned that there are two kinds of elephant: the Asian elephant, Elephas maximus, and the African elephant Loxodonta africana. Both species of elephant are big, but male African elephants can be significantly larger than their Asian cousins, with big adult males reaching 15,000 pounds and 14 feet tall, while male Asian elephants rarely surpass 10,000 pounds, and max out at about 9 feet. Females of both African and Asian elephants are smaller.

There are a few easy ways to distinguish African and Asian elephants other than size. Asian elephants have smaller ears than African elephants. You can tell what kind of elephant is reaching for you by the number of prehensile "tips" on its trunk: Asian elephants have one, while African elephants have two. If you're being trampled underfoot by the elephant you want to identify, count the toenails. Asian elephants have five nails on their forefeet and four on their hind feet, while African elephants have four in front and three in back.

That's how we learned it back in the Twentieth Century, at least. But there's always been a lot of diversity among African elephants. In particular, forest-dwelling elephants in Africa's Congo region tended to be smaller and darker than their bush-dwelling neighbors, with more rounded ears. They also have five toenails in front and four in back like Asian elephants.

In 2000 scientists suggested that those forest elephants were properly considered a different species from African bush elephants, and named the new species Loxodonta cyclotis. In 2010, genetic testing of the two African species showed that they are quite distantly related, diverging between two and seven million years ago.

Sadly, forest elephants, which make up about a third of the total elephant population on the continent, happen to live in one of the most dangerous places in the world for elephants: the Congo Basin, where ivory poaching by paramilitary groups and others poses a serious threat to the species. Scientists estimate that between 2002 and 2011. the world population of forest elephants declined by 62 percent due to poaching, and the problem has only grown since.

Meanwhile, Asian elephants were down to about 32,000 worldwide as of 2013, and African bush elephants have declined dramatically throughout their range, with losses of 80 percent of the local population in places like Tanzania's Selous ecosystem.

Despite elephants' protected status and declining numbers, you can still shoot them legally.

In the wake of widespread outrage about the trophy killing of Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe, you might be surprised to learn that trophy hunting of elephants is a thriving industry. Among African game sport hunters, elephants are considered one of the coveted "Big Five" wildlife trophy species, along with lions, leopards, rhinos, and buffalo.

That includes the critically imperiled African forest elephant, which safari hunt outfitters often publicize as the centerpiece of their Central African excursion packages. But all three species of elephants, bush, forest, and Asian, are subject to a thriving trophy trade, with hunters shelling out thousands of dollars for the privilege.

The Asian elephant was listed as Endangered under the U.S. Endangered Species Act in 1976, and listed under the Convention in International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) as an "Appendix I" species -- the highest level of global protection -- in 1975. African elephants were listed as Threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act in 1978, and added to Appendix I of CITES in 1990, but populations in Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe were subsequently placed on the less protective Appendix II.

African Elephants' U.S. Endangered Species Act listing hasn't been updated to reflect new species status for forest elephants, so they're considered African elephants under the Endangered Species Act and thus a Threatened species. Some groups are working to "uplist" both species of African elephants to Endangered.

Elephants are also protected under many other nations' laws, as well as under the global Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. And yet some African countries not only allow but encourage hunting of elephants.

The reason is because of those trophy hunting fees, which at least in theory make elephants a source of potential income for communities that would otherwise see the giant animals as a liability. And much of the money generated from those fees theoretically goes toward conservation of the elephants and their habitat.

That's on paper. In practice, it's not so tidy. Allowing wealthy hunters from the U.S., Europe and East Asia to kill elephants while local farmers aren't allowed to do so has backfired in many cases, and in several African countries those trophy fees can end up lining the pockets of bureaucrats rather than benefiting the remaining elephants.

You can import ivory into the U.S. legally if it's from an elephant you shot.

Or at least in some circumstances. The elephant must have been hunted legally, which in theory means a paper trail for each trophy registered with CITES, and appropriate fees paid. You can only bring two trophy elephants in per hunter per year, meaning a maximum of four tusks. The tusks must be whole and unworked,

In order to allow the import of elephant trophies, USFWS relies on a clause in the U.S. Endangered Species Act that allows hunting of a protected species as long as that hunting "enhances" the chances of survival of the species as a whole. As of early 2015, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wasn't allowing hunters to import trophy elephants shot in Tanzania or Zimbabwe, citing concerns that hunting in those countries wasn't helping elephants. But hunters who take an elephant in Botswana, South Africa, or Namibia, the Cites Appendix II countries, can import those trophies into the U.S. as long as they have a proper CITES export permit from the country of origin. In other african countries where elephants are on Appendix I, USFWS must also issue an import permit under CITES before a hunter can import an elephant trophy.

Trophies generally consist of whole tusks, heads, skins, feet, or femurs. According to USFWS, several hundred African elephant trophies are imported to the U.S. each year, including tusks.

Elephants weep.

They also grieve, express joy, display love and loyalty, and show a range of other emotions that had formerly been considered the exclusive domain of human beings.

Behaviorists caution that it's risky to try to read human-like emotions into non-human animals. Behavior that would read as contentment or affection in a human being might be indicative of extreme stress in another species.

That said, it's hard to read anything but exuberance and joy into this young elephant's play:

Elephants have really big brains, and are generally considered to rank with primates and cetaceans in terms of raw intelligence. Like other mammals, elephants' brains possess a pair of organs called the hippocampi, which are involved in translating short-term memory into long-term memory. Some researchers also suggest the hippocampus is involved in emotion and learning, especially regarding spatial relationships.

In elephants, the hippocampus is especially well-developed. Elephant brains also contain spindle neurons, a distinct type of nerve cell that's also found in other large-brained species such as great apes and dolphins and which have been tentatively linked to social behavior.

The significance of the anatomy of elephants' brains is an open question. Behavior? Not so much. Elephant families are incredibly tight-knit, matrilineal groups. Males often strike out on their own after reaching adulthood, but aside from that, the only thing that can interfere with the elephant family bond is death or forced separation (for example, capture by humans).

Female elephants will adopt orphaned calves. Aunts are fiercely protective of their nieces and nephews. Elephants seem to have some understanding of death: family members will visit graves of relatives several years after their passing. They will attempt to revive family members who have just died, then bury the remains when it becomes clear Aunt Clara isn't coming around.That apparent care for others extends to non-elephants as well, apparently. Writer Craig Holdrege describes one trained domestic Asian elephant who:

Again, it's risky to ascribe human-like compassion to this kind of behavior: there are other reasons elephants might behave in ways that resemble love, kindness, or altruism. what's more, domesticated work elephants might well show very different emotional responses than their wild counterparts, just as dogs seem to display different emotions than wolves. Elephant cognition and elephant emotion are almost wholly a mystery, as if an alien intelligence has been living with us for hundreds of thousands of years, right under our noses.

Or maybe I should say we've been under theirs.