Forest elephants are wonderfully well adapted to life in the rainforest. Their narrower bodies help them push through dense trees and undergrowth without getting stuck, and their straighter tusks are useful for digging into the soil to reach mineral salts that supplement their diet. They eat fruit, leaves, bark and roots — whatever the forest offers.
These elephants are sometimes called the 'gardeners of the forest' because of the incredible role they play in spreading seeds. When an elephant eats fruit and then walks many kilometres through the jungle, the seeds come out in its dung far from the parent tree. Many of West Africa's big rainforest trees depend almost entirely on forest elephants to spread their seeds this way.
Forest elephants are shy and very quiet compared with savanna elephants — they can move through the forest with barely a sound despite weighing over 2,000 kilograms. They communicate using very low, rumbling calls that humans can barely hear, which travel long distances through the dense vegetation. Scientists call these sounds 'infrasound'.