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Credit: CC0 Public Domain
A team of researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, the Atlanta Zoo and the Rochester Institute of Technology has revealed ways for elephants to catch and eat small objects very quickly and quickly. In their article published in Journal of the Royal Society Interface, the group describes his study and what he found.
The researchers noted that because of their huge size and the type of food they eat, elephants have to eat a lot every day. Previous research has shown that adults consume an average of 200 kilograms of food each day, mostly vegetation. Because of their enormous appetite, elephants must be able to eat a wide variety of foods, whether large or small. In this new effort, researchers have wondered how elephants can pick up and eat things like grain or even flour with their trunks. To find out, they filmed an adult woman in the Atlanta Zoo collecting rutabagas and carrots cut into pieces of different sizes. They also fed his sound, which was in powder form.
The researchers discovered that the elephant formed a joint with its trunk that allowed it to stack the sound and then crush it so hard that it melted into a form that it was able to take and eat. To make the joint, the elephant has folded its snout at a narrow angle, using a portion of it as a backplate. The other part of the muzzle then pressed the food against the back plate, compressing it to form a solid mass. Once formed, the elephant easily picked up the mass and brought it to his mouth. The team noted that the elephant had formed bottom plates of different heights depending on the type of food. They were also able to measure the force exerted by the trunk on the food material – 47 Newtons to crush a heap of 50 grams of sound.
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More information:
Jianing Wu et al. The elephant trunks form joints to squeeze together small objects, Journal of the Royal Society Interface (2018). DOI: 10.1098 / rsif.2018.0377
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