When Daniella Chusy, currently at Indiana University, U.S., learned that many captive elephants were thought to be overweight and that their low birth rates suggested that they may be facing a fertility crisis, she began seeing parallels with the obesity crisis humans face currently. But no one had actually measured how much fat captive Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) in zoos carry. “I was interested in discovering whether methods predominantly used in human health research could help us learn more about elephants,” says Chusyd at University of Alabama at Birmingham, U.S. (UAB) at the time. She and her colleagues decided to learn about the relationship between the amount of fat the animals carry and their health and they publish their discovery that captive Asian elephants are less fat than the average human in Journal of Experimental Biology.
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Source: Phys.org