Elephants enter a volcanic cave in search of salt to eat

Large herbivores such as elephants often look for natural mineral deposits to replenish their sodium intake because minerals from plants and water are not sufficiently sodium.

In Elgon Mountain National Park on the Kenya-Uganda border, elephants know how to exploit sodium rich rock in a volcano that turned off about 24 million years ago - the Elgon mountain. Mount Elgon is the oldest extinct volcano in East Africa.

The foothills are 80 km wide and the peak is more than 3,000 m. Elephants prefer to stay in low slopes - home to some salt caves. The caves are quite massive, 150 meters long, 60 meters wide and about 10 meters high.

It is not uncommon to see elephants swallow soil and lick rocks high in sodium.

Elephants use ivory to break the cave walls, then chew and swallow debris, leaving long scratches all over the cave walls. Elephants take several hours of stone chiselling and eat large amounts of salt each time, because they return only a few weeks later.

A small male elephant in the Aberdare National Park in Kenya eats about 14 to 20 kg of saline soil in 45 minutes. From observing a young elephant eating rocks in the Kitum cave in Mount Elgon, the researchers estimated that an average elephant uncovers about two liters of rock from the cave.

Elephants use ivory to break the cave walls, then chew and swallow debris, leaving long scratches all over the cave walls.

In addition to elephants, other animals such as zebrafish and buffalo also eat salt in the cave. Some predators like leopards and hyenas take advantage of this opportunity, hiding in dark caves, attacking elephants, buffaloes and serow. The worst happened in the 1980s when animal hunters discovered this trick. They hide near the entrance to the caves and ambush the elephants as they approach.

From more than 1,200, the number of elephants on Elgon Mountain has dropped to less than one hundred. Poaching has completely changed the habits of the elephants, they work more secretly and start avoiding famous caves.

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