WASHINGTON — He stands 9 feet tall, weighs 6 1/2 tons, and his nickname is Spike.
Friday morning he walked backward into the elephant compound at the National Zoo to become the biggest elephant in the house and the zoo’s biggest resident in recent memory.
Spike, a male Asian elephant with impressive tusks and the heft of a delivery truck, arrived after a 900-mile overnight road trip from Busch Gardens, in Tampa, where he had lived since 2013.
He walked through a portal at the elephant house labeled “Loadout” to begin his new life with the zoo’s six females and to renew acquaintances.
His chief assignment is to mate with the zoo’s youngest female elephant, his old flame, Maharani, and produce offspring, said Bryan Amaral, a senior zoo curator.
Asian elephants are critically endangered, and every birth in captivity is crucial. “There’s a huge effort and a purpose to breeding elephants,” Amaral said. “We want to reinvigorate our breeding program here.”
Zoo officials have hopes for Spike and Maharani because they knew each other intimately when both lived at the Calgary Zoo in Canada several years ago for about a decade.
Spike, 36, and Maharani, 27, produced three calves there. None survived. One was a premature stillbirth. Another died of disease. And the third died after reportedly being rejected by Maharani and Maharani’s mother, Kamala.
In 2012, the Calgary Zoo announced that it was closing its elephant exhibit and shipping out its elephants. Spike went to Tampa. And Maharani, Kamala, 43, and another elephant, Swarna, also 43, came to Washington.
Spike’s arrival reunites the group. And Amaral said keepers will closely monitor the dynamic.
Spike left Tampa at 12:30 p.m. Thursday as part of a caravan that included several chase cars. He arrived at the zoo a little after 8 a.m., accompanied by a large police escort using lights and sirens.
On arrival, a construction crane lifted the elephant’s traveling crate from the tractor-trailer to a secluded entrance to the elephant house.
And after almost a full day out on the interstate Spike backed into a room with a rubberized floor and piles of sand.
In addition to Maharani, Kamala and Swarna, the other females at the zoo include Ambika, 70, Shanthi, 43, and Bozie, 43.
All are Asian elephants. The zoo had a male Asian elephant, Kandula, who was born there, but he was only 13 and weighed half what Spike weighs. Kandula could not breed with Maharani, who is his aunt.
So in 2015 he was moved to the zoo in Oklahoma City where he could breed without genetic problems.
Maharani, meanwhile, “is the only [female] elephant that we have that we would consider reproductively viable,” Amaral said in an interview at the zoo Thursday.
“It’s fantastic,” he said. “Having happy, healthy, well-cared for, well-adjusted elephants is great . . . [but] there is nothing we can do as animal-care staff as enriching as putting a baby elephant on the ground for these elephants to be with.”
