Possible lifespan of an elephant?

Question

Elephants die because their last teeth fall out and they starve.

If, say, they had artificial teeth that could be replaced again and again and could still eat, how long would the elephants live for?

Answer 1

Probably no older than about 80, at the most. Elephants lose their last teeth at about 60, which, as you mentioned, results in them starving to death in the wild. In captivity, however, elephants can be fed soft foods after this, and are known to live up to 70. With veterinary medicine improving all the time, they could probably live beyond this, but like all animals their organs would eventually give out.

Answer 2

You can calculate roughly the lifespan of mammals with the formula:

lifespan in years = 1,000,000,000 / (365*24*3600*(heart rate/60))

the large number is the number of heartbeats a heart can make in it's lifetime

365*24*3600 is the number of seconds in a year.

heart rate is in beats per minute.

Examples:

humans (60 bpm): 31.7 years

elephants (30 bpm): 63 years

large whales (20 bpm): 95 years

cats (150 bpm): 12 years

hamsters(450 bpm):4 years

A study suggests that the energy consumption per atom in the body per heartbeat is the same in all animals, somwhere around 10^-8 O2 molecules per heart beat per atom. This is a "universal constant" if you want. This leads to the conclusion that lifespan depends directly on the energy consumption of living cells and that the heart rate (beats per minute) is a direct indicator of the metabolic rate (rate of energy conversion) of the animal. The faster the heart beats the higher the metabolic rate and the lower the expected lifespan.

As you can see the expected lifespan of humans is only 32 years. We shouldn't forget that medical care, hygiene and many other factors prolong our life extraordinarily. The average lifespan of humans was somewhere around that only a few thousand years ago. With civilisation the lifespan became longer. Another conclusion we can draw is that the human heart seems to have a huge reserve (of about an extra 200%), for reasons we don't know yet.

Long talk, short conclusion:

Even if an elephant would go to the dentist it wouldn't get much older - unless elephant hearts had these reserves too (but that's not mentioned anywhere).

For more info see below!

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Edit:

"you provide a good point but you pointed out that the estimated lifespan for humans is 32 years old. Yet some people quadruple that. So if the same was done for elephants, would they live for 252 years ?!?!"

As I said, humans are an exeption, for yet unknown reasons.

The number of people quadrupling the lifespan is virtually zero. The lifespans calculated with the formula are rough estimations and only give a hint at the EXPECTED lifespan. See it as an average with a lot of animals dying before and a lot dying later. But the lion's share of animals reach an age near this average. The attached links explain what I've written in more detail.

Answer 3

Around 80 years depending on the elephant's health.