An elephant has given birth to twin girls in Kenya, a rare event for the largest land mammal, an association protecting the endangered species announced Friday.
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The two baby elephants were born in the Samburu National Reserve in the north of this East African country as the daughter of a female named Alto, the Save the Elephants organization was pleased about this “double joy”.
Twin cases only account for about 1% of elephant births, but two more twin elephant calves were born in the Samburu Reserve in early 2022 – a male and a female.
In a video posted by Save the Elephants on its X account (formerly Twitter), we can see the two baby elephants nursing their mother in the presence of other animals in the group.
Hooray! Another set of twins (both female) were born in Samburu National Reserve, almost two years after Bora from the Winds gave birth to twins for the first time in decades. Meet Alto’s doppelgängers, discovered by our researchers for the first time this week.
🎥Gilbert Sabinga pic.twitter.com/A3y6n8NLjg
– Save the Elephants (@ste_kenya) November 24, 2023
Elephants have the longest gestation period of any mammal: they carry their young for almost 22 months and give birth approximately every four years.
Twin elephants don’t always survive: twins born in Samburu in 2006 only survived a few days.
There are more than 36,000 elephants in Kenya, according to the country’s first national census of all wildlife in 2021.
This figure represents a 12% increase compared to the population in 2014, when poaching for ivory was higher.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) warned in 2021 that poaching and habitat destruction, particularly through land conversion for agriculture, was having a devastating impact on elephant numbers across Africa.
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