Ambika, Asian elephant (photo)

In 2010, the National Zoo opened the first phase of Elephant Trails, a new, expanded home where the Zoo’s Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) can exercise and forage as they would in the wild. Elephants use their trunks—which contain more than 40,000 muscles—to manipulate everything from small leaves and huge tree limbs to water and dust. Asian elephants are native to the dense forests of south Asia. However, these habitats are rapidly disappearing due to human expansion, and the pachyderms’ populations have decreased by 70 percent over the past three generations.