Elephants

These humongous mammals are the largest living land animals. Mammoth is an understatement. They are most definitely among the most amazing behemoths to ever walk the face of the earth. We’ll explore the exotic world of elephants on this week’s episode of FYI!

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[Music] these humongous mammals are the largest living land animals mammoth is an understatement they are most definitely among the most amazing behemoths to ever walk the face of the earth we'll explore the exotic world of elephants on this week's episode of f y i welcome to for your info english you got it[Music] hello hello hello and welcome to another exciting edition of fyi i was just thinking about it i can't believe that we're in the fourth season so there's 30 episodes per season so if you do the math let's count three episodes done and dusted that's 90 episodes but if you're a patron and you get bonus episodes every week well do the math there's a hundred and eighty episodes at your disposal plus you have access to over 600 posts and all you have to do is go over to patreon.com slash alberto alonso and consider joining our curious community because aside from getting tons of bonus content early access you'll also get pdfs with all the vocabulary we look at in this episode and the bonus episode plus you can get weekly review classes with me and monthly master classes plus you have access to me 24 7. so here's my question for you what are you waiting for we are having fun over on patreon and i'd like to send a shout out to all my patrons especially my super duper students javier roberto david jose maria mila alex patricio and edgar and don't forget about my interstellar students issa paco diego carmen and diana keep up the great work and remember if you guys are interested in finding out more just go over to patreon.com alberto alonso and find out about our curious community so who's ready to talk about the elephant in the room hey we use that expression too to talk about the problem that is evident that nobody is bringing up to bring up is another way to say to mention so the elephant in the room and we're gonna take a look at a lot of idiomatic expressions and elephant vocabulary a little bit later on but let's start out with our intro i started out by saying these humongous mammals and humongous means huge very very big when big isn't enough we say humongous and a mammal well that's you it is i imagine only mammals listen to this podcast hey you never know there might be a few reptiles tuned in and the first fun fact that i learned is that they are the largest living land animals and then i said mammoth ques pero tambien significa enorme so i said mammoth fi house in the procession mammoth is an understatement then i said they are most definitely among the most amazing behemoths another way to say something very large i think we looked at that word in the titanic episode and hey wait there's another way to say huge titanic if you don't know a million synonyms for the word huge after this episode you'll never know them and then i wrapped up by saying to ever walk the face of the earth and i think you say the same thing de la tierra and then you heard that sound that trumpet sound it's like a trumpet slash roar and then i said we'll explore the exotic world of elephants so what's the verdict you say vereditto we say verdict are you guys elephant lovers i wasn't really an elephant lover well i always respected them i always thought that they were cool but i didn't know very much about them until i went to thailand and i'm going to tell you all about my experience walking with them swimming with them feeding them i mean i spent a day hanging out with elephants and i'll tell you all about it in the bonus part but there's no doubt in my mind that's where my love affair with elephants all began so let's take a look at elephants let's familiarize ourselves let's get to know elephants as i said they are the largest existing land animals there are three living species that are currently recognized you have the african bush elephant and bushes de las ramas no de los arbustos the bush is another way to say the forest as well then you have the african forest elephant hmm that's a little bit confusing and then the asian elephant now the largest of all land animals that's in the african elephant category and we'll see there is a difference between them and we'll highlight some of those differences throughout the podcast for example african elephants which are the largest ones well an adult male can weigh take a guess can weigh anywhere between 1 800 kilos to are you ready for this 6 300 kilos so that's like the max weight that you'll find on an elephant now there are elephants that have broken that record but we're talking on average and on average also females are smaller but just to put things into perspective just to give you a general idea an elephant's tooth can weigh as much as three kilos just one tooth another way to tell them apart and to telepartus distinguish is their ears african elephants ears are much larger than their counterparts and supposedly you can google this they are shaped like the african continent now i don't know if that was god just with a sense of humor but that's insane it's shaped like the african continent whereas the ears of asian elephants are shaped like the indian subcontinent that's pretty crazy i never stopped to look at that also there's a trunk difference the trunk is el trumpo i think you say african elephants have like these these two little fingers to call them a certain way these two fingers that are at the tip of their trunks the tip is la punta and i guess they use that to grab things and as we'll see later on their trunks serve many many purposes they're multi-purpose but asian elephants only have one of those little fingers or digits at the end of their trunk now what about their habitat well you can find elephants in all kinds of habitats including savannas forests deserts marshes marshes are usually muddier areas they're herbivores so they mostly eat plants i know they eat bananas because i fed them bananas but they also eat grass and other plants as i say they stay near water when it's accessible so they definitely migrate towards water well if you think about how much food they need a day well they're going to need some water to wash it down sure they need up to 150 kilos of food per day to be satisfied and you thought your brother-in-law was a heavy eater and what does a lot of food mean a lot of poo that's right they create about a ton of poop per week yeah you can say poop or poo yeah that's pretty crazy but hey it's good for the soil la tierra it keeps it fertile and it also disperses the tree seeds so their poop is very important did you ever think you were going to listen to a podcast about elephant poop well the whole podcast isn't about poop just this little section in fact i'm pooped what does that mean estoy cansado i'm pooped i don't want to talk about poop anymore and what about their lifespan how long do you think elephants can live supposedly they can live up to 70 years in the wild now there are some that have lived to 80 and even 90 but as i said we're going for the average here so about 70 years in the wild and they are great communicators maybe it's their survival skills their communication skills that keeps them going but they communicate by touch sight smell and sound oh and infrasound oh and seismic communication that's right seismic waves they can feel vibrations over long distances so these are pretty intelligent animals in fact they've compared their intelligence to that of primates and they are they're smart animals they're funny animals i mean they have a sense of humor and again i know that from first-hand experience i spent a day with these mammals and it was memorable to say the least and they're very self-aware constricted they show empathy for their dying or dead family members and they even recognize themselves in the mirror so these are brilliant animals and not just brilliant but i feel like they feel they're sensitive as well so they've got that sensible thing sensatos and sensitive sensible be careful those are false friends in english now there's always a dark side and we're going to talk about that a little bit later on but as we know elephants are endangered in fact african forest elephants are critically endangered african bush elephants an asian elephants are on the endangered species list but the african forest ones critically endangered so my question is this how long until the african bush elephants and the asian elephants make it to the critically endangered list we've got to do something fast and we'll find out some of the challenges some of the things that elephants are faced with later on in today's show but right now i want to take a look at some of the most famous elephants out there and i guess this is a good moment to send a shout out to my daughter her favorite elephant is ellie do you guys know ellie the elephant from pocoyo she loves ellie i mean sh it is her favorite elephant even more than dumbo and we're going to talk about dumbo but first let's talk about jumbo now wait jumbo and dumbo are they related well yes there is a connection jumbo was a famous elephant and he was born around december 1860 and he died in september 1885 and he was an african bush elephant who was born in sudan and sadly so his mother was killed by hunters so he started off with adversity but let me tell you something we didn't use the word jumbo before this elephant existed nope not jumbo jets not jumbo shrimp gambones a jumbotron ques la pantaya en estadio all of those words owe their origin to jumbo the elephant and jumbo was exported to oh oh here goes my french jardin de plant a zoo in paris and in 1865 he was transferred to the london zoo in england and against public public opinion because there was a lot of public outcry protesta he was sold to p.t barnum and i'm sure you're all familiar with p.t barnum the guy who was a showman an entertainer there's a movie out there starring hugh grant no hugh jackman can you imagine hugh grant hello it is me pt bottom and i'm an attractive man no p.t barnum a little bit different and hugh jackman yeah he's a little bit different than hugh i got my hues mixed up me confundi con los hughes but this guy p.t barnum he had like a traveling circus in fact the most famous circus in the united states is ringling brothers and barnum and bailey circus pt barnum there you go so people were against that and even now you're seeing circuses say okay maybe we should take elephants and animals in general out of our shows again there are many different opinions here but a lot of people are saying well listen i can go to a circus and i don't have to see elephants to be entertained especially if those elephants are living in less than favorable conditions but just to give you an idea of jumbo's sheer size the height to his shoulders or as we would say shoulder height was estimated to have been 3.2 meters now if you're afraid of heights you wouldn't want to get up on a platform that was that high and at the time of his death they say that he was about four meters tall that's what the head included and everything so the reason we have the word jumbo is because of jumbo and the reason we have dumbo is because of jumbo that's right disney in their 1941 animated film called dumbo they released this and it was inspired by jumbo and of course this is a classic tale jumbo or dumbo hmm now here's my question why did they change the name because i like the name jumbo i think it works better than dumbo i know it's a weird one because dumbo and i think of tontoron even though the word tonto we don't really pronounce well we don't really we don't pronounce that b in there so it's not uh dumb it's dumb and it's not dumbo in english remember we say dumbo and while we're at it that's a difficult one to say isn't it while we're at it hey take a moment pause right now and say it with me while we're at it while we're at it yeah it's tough i know it's like a a tongue twister of sorts even for me as a native speaker it doesn't necessarily roll off the tongue as we say and if something doesn't roll off the tongue so let's take a look at some synonyms we already said in the opening i believe we said humongous mammoth behemoth these were ways to say not big like super big extra big we've got huge that's one that we use i think probably if you want my opinion on this one the one we use the most is huge and not just like enorme like in tamano like if you give me some good news i'll say oh wow that's huge so again it's one of these words like nice which we use in english and it has so many meanings like the word get or the word mean what do you mean i mean these are words these words that we use often that you should familiarize yourself with such as the word point what's your point is the feed it's pointless no so i know i know when you think of the word point you think of senjalar but remember i wanted to point out that many words have many meanings see what i did there point out this okay i'll stick to my day job as we say i'll stick to my day job means i won't become a stand-up comedian oh and speaking of i hope you guys enjoyed the episode with dan on stand-up comedy he is huge see there's that usage of enorme another one gigantic gigantic and enormous now we've decided to mix those too so you can say gigantic you can say enormous or you can say ginormous another one which i think this one rings a bell colossal colossal massive immense immense gargantuan yeah we've got a lot of ways to say big well think about this a lot of people have that philosophy bigger is better but not always is it at least not in my opinion another one we looked at titanic which we looked at that in a whole episode but just remember in english we don't say titanic right so a lot of these words as i said you'll recognize like gigantico right gigantic but what makes these words difficult in many cases is the way they're pronounced so pronounce these words aloud like you say mamut right we say mammoth it was a mammoth undertaking so remember in many cases these words don't just refer to large as a size and hey there's another one large here's one that i didn't even know existed so as i always tell you guys on each episode you aren't the only ones learning do you think i knew this much about elephants before i recorded this episode no i had to look it up but i will tell you if you ever get the chance to be around these amazing animals do it do it because they are so special and the word i learned will wrap up with this because hey if i'm learning then you must be learning and that word is elephantine or it can be pronounced elephantine that's up to you depends if you're in the united states or england yeah i had to look it up i didn't want to tell you guys the wrong way to say it but it makes sense something that's huge is elephantine or elephantine tomato tomato either either neither neither isn't it great when you have options in english well folks we're gonna wrap up this first part of today's episode i really hope you'll join us in the bonus part of today's fyi[Applause][Music][Applause] you