The animal they rescued certainly wasn’t one you’d typically expect to find out paddling in the ocean — and the 12-hour rescue mission was dibbed a “miraculous recovery”.

Even though Asian elephants are sociable, the females are the most sociable and live in groups of around six or seven, whereas the males spend their time alone.

The smallest elephants tend to be found on the island of Borneo, whereas the most giant Asian elephants can be found in Sri Lanka.

Asian elephants are smaller in stature than African elephants. They also have small and rounded ears and twin-domed heads, whereas African elephants have round heads.

Navy personnel theorize that the animal was caught in a current off the coast near the town of Kokkilai and dragged out into the open ocean. Luckily, the elephant was spotted by a patrol boat.

The basic approach of the rescue was to drag the stranded animal back to shore. Far easier said than done, and safely executing the rescue was a 12-hour operation.

They tied ropes to the animal and began to carefully drag it back toward land. Once they had gently towed the elephant into shallow waters near the coast, they released it to go on its way.

According to Avinash Krishan of the conservation group A Rocha, elephants are excellent swimmers. Swimming 10 miles or so from the shore isn’t that unusual for them.

Salt water also isn’t particularly good for their skin. So despite elephants frequently swimming offshore, a rescue intervention was probably needed in this case.

It is sensitive because they have a lot of nerves covering their skin, so the feeling of salt water on the stranded elephant was bound to mess with its sensitive nerve supply.

At the beginning of the 20th century, around 100,000 Asian elephants existed. However, their numbers are now at just 50,000, so losing one more elephant would mean they are declining even more.

Most of this work is being done in Thailand, Nepal, and China to reduce conflict between humans and wildlife and to try to ensure a peaceful coexistence between the two.

As they eat through the vegetation, they spread seeds as they go, which leads to vegetation growth.

As forests are essential to wildlife and humans and help fight against climate change, this is a crucial part of the natural order of life, meaning their conservation is essential.

In California alone, wildfires have burned five times the amount of land this year compared to the average amount it would have done at the same time in other years. While Asian elephants aren’t native to California, similar issues are happening worldwide.

Elephants have been known to swim in salt water too. A group of elephants was famously brought to the Admaman Islands, an Indian archipelago, in the 1970s and learned to swim between the small landforms to help log the islands.

Elephants often wade through shallow waters or even swim across the lagoon as a shortcut. That’s likely what this one was doing before being swept out to sea.

Elephants use their trunks as a sort of natural snorkel. They also have a lung structure that’s unique among mammals and enables them to withstand pressure variations above and below the water.

Their skeletal structure, coordinated muscles, and neurological systems enhance their survival skills, such as their ability to stand on their rear legs to climb up and down steep slopes.

Genetically speaking, elephants are close relatives of dugongs and manatees. These species themselves are closely related and are both large, fully aquatic mammals. Both dugongs and manatees are in fact believed to be descendants of land mammals.

Other biologists believe elephants may have swum to Sri Lanka from southern India. This would in fact have seen them take a similar route to the stranded animal the navy rescued.

This type of elephant tends to prefer forage plants, but it has been surviving off of any plant or other available resources.

This could be one reason the elephant ended up deep in the water. It could have gone in to have a drink but ended up going too far or doing this while trying to cross over to the other side.

But perhaps more bizarre is the fact that to local experts, it wasn’t that out of the ordinary. The idea of elephants being regular swimmers makes sense when you consider their biology and how they came to populate island habitats. However, you still don’t think of them as being quite so at home in the open sea.