Rings of cartilage supports the two nostrils all the way up the trunk and they can weigh kg and are able to lift objects of more than twice that! It has also noted that some elephants have a preferred side to their trunk, just like our right or left-handedness.
Some fossil mammoth tusks also show that they rested their trunks by draping them over a preferred tusk. One of the main functions of the elephant's trunk is for feeding and drinking. With two tall, pillar-like legs and a large, heavy head, bending down or reaching up can be very strenuous! The long trunk alleviates this by allowing the elephant to graze the ground or trees for food without so much as moving their head at all. They can also suck up and squirt almost 14 litres of water into their mouths.
Being strict vegetarians and having such enormous bulk, elephants need to take on and digest an incredible amount of food each day. While their wide,flat grinding teeth work the fibrous plant material into a digestible pulp, the trunk can make itself useful by independently searching and retrieving more food.
No need to stop chewing to graze when you're an elephant! With a sense of smell that is up to four times that of a bloodhound, an elephant's periscoping trunk can hunt out for friends and relatives, potential predators and food or water sources. Its length and flexibility also allows it to keenly interpret the direction of smell. Again, useful when you don't want to move your massive head around. By changing the shape and size of their nostrils elephants can control their trumpeting vocalisations in order to communicate with other individuals in their herd, send a message to rivals or even members of other species.
Elephants can often be seen intertwining their trunks with other elephants, specifically with friends or family, in a greeting much like a human handshake or hug. A short trunk, such as that of tapirs, isn't that useful in terms of grasping and as such would be hard to select for and refine over successive generations. Half a trunk isn't that useful to a fully grown elephant! One theory suggests that the trunk could have initially evolved as a snorkel for breathing whilst submerged.
This would then prove useful later when it could be utilised for the many functions mentioned above. A case of "chicken or the egg" for the pachyderm world. And Steph Fennessy, from the Giraffe Conservation Foundation in Namibia, answers these questions about giraffes: Why do giraffes have long necks? Why do animals have different patterns, like zebras, giraffes, cheetah? What's a giraffe's usual life span? And why are their tongues purple? The trunk of an elephant is a really long nose, but a whole lot more useful than ours is!
Elephant trunks have more than 40, muscles, which lets them do just about anything with their trunk," says Peter Wrege. By comparison, humans have about muscles in our whole body! Our noses have just four muscle groups to help them function.
But did you know that early elephant ancestors didn't have a trunk at all? Early elephants did have tusks, and one idea is that as tusks got longer, it was harder and harder for elephants to get their mouths to the ground to reach the grass. The trunk helped them to reach more food," according to Wrege.
It also helps elephants eat more food in a shorter time. While they're chewing up a mouthful of grass or leaves, they're using their trunk to get the next bite. It's purple, black and really long, 20 inches 50 centimeters. And if you watch them feeding, they wrap their tongues around the branches to drag off the leaves. Many people think that it's purple, or really dark black, to protect it from the sun; just like you use sunscreen to protect your skin from the sun," says Steph Fennessy of the Giraffe Conservation Foundation.
Another fun fact is that their saliva is anti-septic. Read the full transcript. This episode features coloring pages by Barclay Tucker.
Download and print the elephant and the giraffe. You can color as you listen! About the coloring page artist- Barclay Tucker lives his dream of being an illustrator, designer, artist, and teacher. He resides among the hills of The Northeast Kingdom in Vermont with his wife, four children, and two and a half cats. He teaches illustration, and graphic design at Northern Vermont University — Lyndon.
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