The elephant trunk is a specially adapted body part used for a wide range of purposes. These include breathing, eating, gripping, drinking, smelling, rubbing, and more. How does an elephant trunk work?
Full Answer
What do elephants use their trunks for?
Not only is the trunk used for breathing (and smelling and drinking and feeding) it is also used for social purposes like greetings and caresses. Mother elephants often use their trunks to comfort their offspring by stroking the calf's neck and shoulders. They will even wrap their trunks around the belly or back leg.
Are elephants the only animals with trunks?
Elephants are the only living land animals with a long, boneless trunk. A septum stretches its entire length. This creates two nostrils. But precisely how elephants use those muscular trunks for feeding was always been a bit of a mystery. So mechanical engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta decided to take a few peeks.
What do elephants use their trunk for?
Trunks are elephant’s noses and can detect scents up to 20km away. Elephants use their trunk to feed by grabbing and rotating trees, grasses, branches, and twigs into their mouth. They use their trunks to suck up water which they shoot into the mouth to drink or to spray their bodies to keep cool.
How do Elephants eat with their trunks?
To eat these, elephants sweep loose items into a pile and crush them into a manageable solid that can be picked up by the trunk. “They don’t just use the trunk’s strong muscles to squeeze the plants together,” said Hu. “The elephants also use the weight of the trunk, and they do that by forming a joint in the trunk.
Why do people sell elephant trunks?
The highest demand for ivory is in China, where tusks are carved into sculptures or used in other products. Many Chinese consider ivory a symbol of luck, wealth, and status. Other countries including the U.S. also have illegal ivory markets.
Why is Elephant Trunk so expensive?
It has no intrinsic value, but its cultural uses make ivory highly prized. In Africa, it has been a status symbol for millennia because it comes from elephants, a highly respected animal, and because it is fairly easy to carve into works of art.
How much are elephant trunks worth?
Poachers are now slaughtering up to 35,000 of the estimated 500,000 African elephants every year for their tusks. A single male elephant's two tusks can weigh more than 250 pounds, with a pound of ivory fetching as much as $1,500 on the black market.
Is Elephant Trunk tasty?
Elephant's trunk and tongue are also good, and, after long simmering, much resemble the hump of a buffalo, and the tongue of an ox; but all the other meat is tough, and, from its peculiar flavour, only to be eaten by a hungry man.
How much is a real elephant tusk worth?
Black-market values are, of course, often invisible to the general public, but the most recent data from criminal justice experts finds that unworked (or raw) elephant ivory sells for about $92/kg on the black market in Africa, while rhino horn is currently selling for $8,683/kg.
What part of elephant is valuable?
Despite the ivory ban imposed by the Chinese government earlier this year, ivory is still the most valuable part of the elephant.
How much is the ivory from an elephant worth?
That's $800 for the 10 kilograms of ivory carried by a typical elephant. That's a lot of money in most African countries. But the big profit is made in Asia. Thai Customs recently evaluated smuggled ivory as being worth $1,800 per kilogram—$18,000 per elephant—wholesale.
What part of elephant is valuable and why?
Elephant tusks evolved from teeth, giving the species an evolutionary advantage. They serve a variety of purposes: digging, lifting objects, gathering food, stripping bark from trees to eat, and defense. The tusks also protect the trunk—another valuable tool for drinking, breathing, and eating, among other uses.
What is the purpose of elephant tusks?
The ivory itself is used to make a variety of items that are typically used to show affluence, wealth or importance.
Where are elephant tusks used?
Although international trade in Asian elephant ivory has been banned since 1975, elephant tusks are used all over the world. The biggest market for ivory is in East Asia. Chinese craftsmen use ivory to carve images of deities, pipes, daggers, chopsticks, jewelry, ornaments, souvenirs and hair accessories. Some Asian nations also highly value elephant tusks for their apparent medicinal properties. Even though science has verified the lack of medicinal properties in ivory, there is still a high demand.
What is ivory used for?
The uses for ivory are primarily decorative. Carved ivory is used to make works of art, religious objects and decorative boxes for costly objects. Historically, ivory was used to make the whites of eyes for statues. It also has been used for fans, false teeth and even dominoes.
Is ivory still in demand?
Even though science has verified the lack of medicinal properties in ivory, there is still a high demand. The ivory trade is blamed for a dramatic drop in the elephant population from 1979 to 1989, says Animal-Rights-Action. Thousands of elephants are still killed each year in Africa for their tusks, according to The Atlantic.
Why did the elephant use her trunk's fingers?
The elephant also used her trunk’s fingers to grab at piles of bran, presumably to avoid inhaling the fine grains. Suction feeding was necessary, however, when Kelly faced the most challenging food item the researchers set on the table: a single tortilla chip.
How old is Kelly the elephant?
A new study highlights the impressive biomechanics and suction power of an elephant’s most defining appendage. Kelly, a 34-year old female African elephant at the Zoo Atlanta, using suction to grab a tortilla chip.
How old is Kelly from Zoo Atlanta?
Working closely with keepers at Zoo Atlanta, the researchers videotaped how Kelly, a 34-year-old female African elephant weighing over 7,400 pounds, grabbed different types of food. When presented with many small rutabaga cubes, the elephant inhaled air through her trunk for suction to pick them up.
How does Kelly use suction?
Though the tortilla chip was thin, fragile and hard to grasp on a smooth surface, Kelly was able to use suction to lift and grab the chip without breaking it. The secret to the elephant’s sucking power seems to reside in its large nostrils and specialized respiratory system.
Why are elephants endangered?
More detailed studies of elephant biology like this one could also improve conservation efforts for the two species of African elephants, which are at risk of forever vanishing from the wild because of habitat loss and poaching. Savanna elephants are now endangered, while forest elephants are critically endangered, with their numbers having dropped by more than 86 percent over the past three decades. Many injuries to elephants from poachers and their traps involve the trunk, so better understanding it could help wounded animals recover.
How do elephants use their trunks?
Elephants use their trunks in a variety of ways. They use it to drink, store and spray water, and they also blow air through it to communicate — their 110-decibel bellows can be heard for miles. “It’s like a muscular multitool,” said Andrew Schulz, a mechanical engineering doctoral student at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
How fast can an elephant inhale?
After measuring how quickly the elephant could use its trunk to suck up water, the researchers calculated that elephant noses could inhale at speeds exceeding 490 feet per second , or almost 30 times as fast as humans can sneeze out of ours.
Why do elephants have trunks?
Besides its efficiency as a tool for eating, drinking and taking dust baths, the trunk of an elephant is a unique structure that plays a fundamental part in this animal's olfactory system. Elephants point their trunks in different directions to sample the air for scents, and when swimming (which they do as rarely as possible), ...
What is the trunk of an elephant?
The trunk of an elephant is a muscular, flexible extension this mammal's upper lip and nose. African savanna elephants and African forest elephants have trunks with two finger-like growths at their tip; the trunks of Asian elephants have only one such fingerlike growth.
How do African elephants use their trunks?
African elephants also use their trunks to take dust baths, which help to repel insects and guard against the harmful rays of the sun (where the temperature can easily exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit). To give itself a dust bath, an African elephant sucks dust into its trunk, then bends its trunk overhead and blows the dust out over its back.
How much water does an elephant hold?
To relieve their thirst, elephants suck water up into their trunks from rivers and watering holes--the trunk of an adult elephant can hold up to ten quarts of water! As with its food, the elephant then squirts the water into its mouth.
When did elephants first appear?
The earliest identified elephant ancestors, like the pig-sized Phiomia of 50 million years ago , had no trunks at all; but as competition for the leaves of trees and shrubs increased, so did the incentive for a way to harvest vegetation that would otherwise be out of reach.
Who is Bob Strauss?
Bob Strauss is a science writer and the author of several books, including "The Big Book of What, How and Why" and "A Field Guide to the Dinosaurs of North America.". The trunk of an elephant is a muscular, flexible extension this mammal's upper lip and nose.
What does it mean when an elephant touches its trunk?
She explains to National Geographic that when an elephant feels uneasy, or is ambivalent about what to do next, he or she may use the trunk in a “touch-face” gesture, a “self-directed touching of the face, mouth, ear, trunk, tusk, or temporal gland, apparently to reassure and self-soothe.”.
What is the elephant trunk used for?
It says a lot. © Elephant Voices Not only is the trunk used for breathing (and smelling and drinking and feeding) it is also used for social purposes like greetings and caresses. From National Geographic : The relationship between a mother elephant and her offspring is a protective, reassuring, and comforting one.
How high can an elephant reach branches?
Imagine how awkward it would be for an elephant to squat down for its mouth to reach water, or how long its neck would have to be to reach leaves? The trunk takes care of all of this – and in fact can reach branches 20 feet high. Think of the selfies it could take, no selfie stick required.
Why do elephants pet themselves?
Apparently, elephants pet themselves with their trunks to makes themselves feel better. In conclusion, a video of a baby elephant learning to use her trunk. Because, "baby elephant learning to use her trunk.".
How many fingers does an elephant have?
At the trunk’s tip , African elephant have two fingers while Asian elephants have one. The dexterity of the fingers allows an elephant the ability to do things like deftly pick up a single blade of grass or hold a paintbrush.
How much water can an elephant hold?
It can suck up to 10 gallons of water a minute and can hold up to two gallons of water at a time! (And for the record, the elephant doesn't drink directly through the trunk, yet uses it so bring water to its mouth.)
Which is more sensitive, an elephant's trunk or a bloodhound's nose?
The upper nasal cavities have chemical and olfactory sensors in the form of millions of receptor cells. So sensitive is an elephant’s trunk that is more capable than a bloodhound's nose and is said to be able to smell water from several miles away.
