--- title: Elephants: families, tusks, ears and memory — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Elephants: families, tusks, ears and memory», a lesson of the biology course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: An elephant herd is a family of grandmothers, mothers, aunts, sisters and babies, and it walks in a line behind the oldest fem --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/22-elephants-families-tusks-ears-memory/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/) / Elephants: families, tusks, ears and m… # Elephants: families, tusks, ears and memory Lesson 22 of the biology course of Mova's primary school: 17 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/biology/22-elephants-families-tusks-ears-memory/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/22-elephants-families-tusks-ears-memory/0/) — An elephant herd is a family of grandmothers, mothers, aunts, sisters and babies, and it walks in a line behind the oldest female, the matriarch, because she has lived longest and remembers the most. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/22-elephants-families-tusks-ears-memory/1/) — Think of a family trip led by Nan, who has done the drive for fifty years: in a drought, the matriarch remembers a waterhole the herd hasn't visited for years and leads them all there. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/22-elephants-families-tusks-ears-memory/2/) — An African elephant's two huge ears are like radiators full of blood vessels, so flapping them cools the blood; spread wide with a head shake, the same ears mean «back off». - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/22-elephants-families-tusks-ears-memory/3/) — Tusks are two very long front teeth made of ivory that grow all life long, and elephants are left- or right-tusked, just as you are left- or right-handed. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/22-elephants-families-tusks-ears-memory/4/) — Dumbo flies with his ears and cartoons show elephants as clumsy and forgetful; real ears never lift an elephant off the ground, but they do cool it, and real elephants remember friends and places for decades. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/22-elephants-families-tusks-ears-memory/6/) — Young males leave the family at around 10 to 15 years old and live alone or in loose groups of males. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/22-elephants-families-tusks-ears-memory/7/) — An elephant mother is pregnant for about 22 months, the longest of any land animal, and the calf weighs about 100 kilograms at birth. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/22-elephants-families-tusks-ears-memory/8/) — A newborn calf stands within about an hour so that it can drink milk and keep up with the herd. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/22-elephants-families-tusks-ears-memory/9/) — Tusks are very long front teeth made of ivory that keep growing all through the elephant's life, but a tusk pulled out at the root never grows back. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/22-elephants-families-tusks-ears-memory/10/) — Elephants use their tusks to dig for water and salt, strip bark, move things and defend themselves. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/22-elephants-families-tusks-ears-memory/11/) — Poachers kill elephants for their tusks, and selling ivory is banned in most countries; where poachers killed many big-tusked elephants, more elephants are now born without tusks, because tuskless ones survived to have young. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/22-elephants-families-tusks-ears-memory/12/) — Elephant ears are full of blood vessels, and flapping them cools the blood; African elephants have much bigger ears than Asian elephants. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/22-elephants-families-tusks-ears-memory/13/) — Spreading the ears wide and shaking the head is a warning to stay back, and a wild elephant can run about 25 kilometres an hour. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/22-elephants-families-tusks-ears-memory/15/) — Elephants recognise old friends after years apart and greet them noisily with rumbles, ear flapping and trunk touches. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/22-elephants-families-tusks-ears-memory/16/) — Elephants touch and smell the bones of dead elephants; scientists think they know these are their own kind, but nobody knows exactly what they feel. - [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/22-elephants-families-tusks-ears-memory/17/) — The elephant graveyard, a secret place where elephants go to die, is a myth. - [18](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/22-elephants-families-tusks-ears-memory/18/) — An Asian elephant named Happy touched a mark on her head after seeing it in a mirror, which suggests she knew the reflection was herself; great apes, dolphins and magpies have passed this mirror test too. - ← previous: [Elephants: the trunk and everything it does](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/21-elephants-the-trunk/) - next →: [Bears](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/23-bears/) - ↑ back to [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/)