SCIENCE: Why do elephants have big ears?

If you've ever wondered why elephants have large ears, after reading today's blog, you'll know. But not all elephants have super large ears. Some have smaller ears, and the elephant relative, the Mammoth, had very small ears. You'll learn why in today's blog.

 

(Photo: Asian-Elephants in the Udawalawe National Park, Sri-Lanka.Credit Cory-Brown_USFWS) 

Why do elephants have big ears?

By Sara Hashemi, LIVE SCIENCE, May 17, 2025

Elephants are known for their intelligence, complex social behavior, memory and size, including their giant ears. The ears of African elephants (Loxodonta africana) can grow up to 6.6 feet (2 meters) long and 4 feet (1.2 m) wide, while Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) have slightly smaller and rounder ears.

That’s about 17% of their body length, which means that while they’re the animal with the largest ears, they’re not actually the one with the largest ears relative to the size of their body. That award goes to the long-eared jerboa (Euchoreutes naso), but it's still impressive to have 6-foot-tall ears.

So why are elephants' ears so big? There's a practical reason for their large size, experts told Live Science: It keeps elephants cool.

An animal that big generates a lot of heat, especially in the hot savannas, forests and grasslands where they live. But unlike humans, elephants don't really sweat, William Sanders, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Michigan who specializes in fossil elephants, told Live Science. Instead, they have very little body hair and "spectacular cooling devices" — massive ears filled with large blood vessels that help the giant animals thermoregulate.

"When the animal gets really warm, it can force blood into its ears, and then it'll flap them," said Advait Jukar, an assistant curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History. Elephant ears have thin skin that is only millimeters thick and the blood vessels that pass through them are large, enabling elephants to move about 20% of their blood supply through their ears at any one time.

The larger the ears are, the more surface area they have to release heat into the surrounding air. Because the blood flowing through them is warmer than the air, the heat dissipates into the elephant's surroundings. Cooler blood then circulates back into the body, helping to reduce the animal's overall temperature, Jukar told Live Science. The animals can expand or constrict their blood vessels depending on whether it's cool or hot, which helps regulate their temperature.