Savanna elephants maintain homeothermy under African heat.

To conserve body water, mammals may reduce evaporative water loss by storing heat, allowing core body temperature to rise more than usual during the day, and to fall more than usual during the cooler night, so demonstrating heterothermy. It has been proposed that elephants are heterothermic, but body temperature never has been measured in elephants over 24 h at environmental temperatures higher than body temperature, where elephants would have to rely on evaporative cooling to maintain homeothermy. We used ingested temperature data loggers to record core temperature of four partly free-ranging savanna elephants exposed to high solar radiation and environmental temperatures that exceeded core temperature (> 36 °C) in their natural habitat.

Coping with heat: behavioural and physiological responses of savanna elephants in their natural habitat.

Most of southern Africa's elephants inhabit environments where environmental temperatures exceed body temperature, but we do not know how elephants respond to such environments. We evaluated the relationships between apparent thermoregulatory behaviour and environmental, skin and core temperatures for tame savanna elephants () that were free-ranging in the hot parts of the day, in their natural environment. Environmental temperature dictated elephant behaviour within a day, with potential consequences for fine-scale habitat selection, space use and foraging.