Elephants, like most mammals including humans are known to be very good, untiring swimmers. Moving all four legs to swim they are able to do so quickly and efficiently and even better than most mammals. Amazingly enough, their massive bodies surprisingly provide enough floatation while their trunks act as a sort of snorkel device. It should be noted that elephants mostly swim with their face above water and their mouths below the water’s surface. As mentioned before, they use their trunks as a sort of snorkel and doing so permits them to breathe while they are underwater.

As elephants are very efficient at swimming and are also very strong, massive animals, they can swim long distances with great ease unlike some mammals who may have a harder time. Experts have even suggested that elephants may have once swam from Southern India to Sri Lankia, where they eventually settled.

Elephants love water and they also love to swim, younger elephants in particular. They also enjoy diving into the water and find great fun in fighting the waves and climbing about in the water onto the older elephant group members before splashing playfully back into the water. They can also be seen bathing in the water or wandering about, shooting water from their trunks playfully at one another and all kinds of other crazy antics.

Contrary to what some people may believe, elephants do not tire very easily when swimming. In fact, an elephant becoming tired from swimming is almost unheard of! Their trunks may even be seen every now and then peeping up above the water’s surface to take a breath, but not long after you will see it disappear beneath the surface again as they continue swimming along their way, quickly and efficiently to their next destination.

This is true, however not a constant occurrence in sleeping elephants. Elephants have been known generally at night to sleep lying down for a couple of hours, however they have also been known to sleep standing up at times. During the day they might be seen standing, taking short naps. Altogether they sleep for about six hours per day.

Because elephants must always be completely alert and aware of their surroundings in the wild, to protect themselves and their young from predators such as lions, they have been known to sleep standing up at times. Sometimes an elephant will lay down for a couple of hours to sleep, although baby elephants are more likely to do this than adult elephants.

Generally most adult elephants that are seen asleep standing up might be just taking a quick nap, or could even be sick. One could say it typically depends on their environment. For instance, If elephants are in kept in an environment such as a zoo where hungry predators are not around, they may be more likely to sleep standing up than say, an elephant who lives in the wild and has lots of predators around.

Indeed more and more elephants are becoming endangered nowadays. Africa, in particular has experienced a continent-wide decline in the number of elephants in just the last few decades. In fact between 1979 and 1989, nearly half of Africa’s elephants were hunted and/or killed for ivory. The expansion of human population is another problem that poses risks to endangering elephants as human settlements limit an elephant’s range of movement. With less food sources available due to this expansion, some elephants have begun to resort to raiding crops. This raiding of crops has often led to many fatalities as farmers defending their livelihoods and their crops have taken this matter quite seriously.