"An elephant's more than 40,000 trunk muscles can upend trees and follow it up with gently collecting the fragments that fell. It takes baby elephants nearly a year to master using their trunks in this way, and it's taken humans even longer to understand how they're able to do it. The secret may come down to elephants' whiskers. Now researchers who analyzed the whiskers lining these animals' trunks have discovered"
"In a study published today in Science, researchers reveal thatunlike the whiskers of other mammalsthose of elephants are more flexible at the tip and stiffer closer to the skin. This observation clarifies how the unique structure of the animals' whiskers informs elephants' umwelt, or their individual sensory and perceptual experience of the world. We found elephants are like aliens, says Andrew Schulz, lead study author and haptic intelligence researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligence Systems."
Elephant trunks combine extraordinary strength and sensitivity through more than 40,000 muscles capable of uprooting trees and delicately collecting fragments. Young elephants require nearly a year to learn nuanced trunk use. Whiskers lining the trunk exhibit a stiffness gradient, being more flexible at the tip and stiffer near the skin, enabling discrimination between tasks that demand force or fine touch. Rough, armor-like skin increases reliance on these filaments for delicate interactions. Digital internal renderings generated by CT scanning allowed close structural analysis of whiskers, revealing the physical basis for enhanced tactile perception and manipulation.
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
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