Imagine waking up tomorrow and discovering that you’re responsible for leading your entire family across miles of unfamiliar country. You need to know where to find water. You need to remember which routes are safe. You need to recognize danger. You need to keep track of everyone traveling with you. And some members of the family are toddlers.

Very large toddlers.

Welcome to life in an elephant family. We notice the size first. It’s difficult not to. An adult elephant is one of those animals that makes you reconsider the meaning of the word large. Their trunks can lift, smell, touch, drink and investigate. Their ears help them communicate and regulate body temperature. Their tusks can dig, strip bark and help with other tasks.

Those are spectacular adaptations. But one of the most interesting elephant superpowers isn’t something a single elephant can do. It’s what elephants can do together.

The Herd Remembers

Elephant family groups can include related females and their young, with experienced older females playing particularly important roles. Knowledge accumulated over many years can matter when a herd needs to find resources or respond to changing conditions. Imagine the value of having someone in your family who remembers a distant water source from years ago. Not because she wrote it down. Because she was there.

That’s one of the things that makes elephant societies fascinating. Survival isn’t simply about the strength or intelligence of one animal. It’s also about relationships and knowledge shared across generations. The youngest elephant doesn’t have to know everything. Someone else remembers. There’s something wonderfully reassuring about that.

Conversations We Can’t Hear

Elephants are also remarkable communicators. Everyone knows the trumpet. It’s difficult to miss. But elephants also produce low-frequency rumbles, including sounds that can travel over considerable distances. Some of that communication occurs at frequencies near or below the lower edge of normal human hearing.

Which means elephants can be having conversations around us that we don’t fully experience. I love facts like that because they remind us that animals don’t simply inhabit our world. They inhabit their own sensory versions of it.

An elephant doesn’t experience a landscape exactly as we do. Sound, smell, vibration, memory and social relationships all contribute information. The herd is connected even when its members aren’t standing side by side.

Who Is in Your Herd?

Animal Heroes always asks a simple question. What can we learn from the animal?

With elephants, I think the answer is connection.

We spend a lot of time celebrating independence. Do it yourself. Figure it out. Be strong. Don’t rely on anyone. There are times when independence matters.

But nature doesn’t seem particularly committed to the idea that strength means doing everything alone. Wolves have packs. Dolphins have pods. Primates have troops. Elephants have herds.

And humans have always formed families, communities, villages and groups because there are things we do better together.

Someone knows something you don’t. Someone remembers something you’ve forgotten. Someone has traveled a road you haven’t reached yet. Sometimes you’re that person for somebody else. Connection isn’t the opposite of strength. It can be one of its sources.

A Very Simple Superpower

You don’t need an elephant’s low-frequency rumble to practice this particular superpower. You probably have a phone. Think of someone in your herd you haven’t spoken to recently. Maybe a friend. A relative. Someone you used to work with. Someone who helped you once. Someone who simply makes your day better when their name appears on the screen.

Send them a message. It doesn’t need to be important. You don’t need an announcement. You don’t need a reason.

“I was thinking about you. How are you?”

That’s enough.

Elephants maintain connections because those relationships matter to the herd. Ours matter too. And unlike an elephant, you don’t have to rumble loudly enough for someone several miles away to hear you.

Although that would make checking in considerably more interesting.

I would like to dedicate this post to my mother. She was the one who always remembered and taught me so much along the way. She would have loved Animal Heroes.