Enhancing the lifetime of wireless sensor networks had baffled researchers for quite some time now. The authors of this research manuscript draw inspiration from the behavior of large elephant swarms and incorporate their behavior into wireless sensor networks. The complex elephant swarm behavior is incorporated using a cross layer approach. The elephant optimization discussed in this paper enables optimized routing techniques, adaptive radio link optimization and balanced scheduling to achieve a cumulative enhanced network performance. The proposed elephant swarm optimization is compared with the popular protocol. The experimental study presented proves that the Elephant Swarm Optimization technique enhances the network life time by about 73%.