ATLANTA — Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have discovered the way an elephant’s trunk works.
Findings from recent research conducted by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology show that elephants dilate their nostrils to create more space in their trunks, which allows them to store up to 5.5 liters of water.
They can also use them to slurp up to three liters per second or about 30 times faster than a human’s sneeze, about 150 meters per second or 330 mph.
The research paper is titled “Suction feeding by elephants” and was published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
The researchers conducted the research to obtain a deeper understanding of how elephants use their trunks to move and manipulate air, food, water, and other objects and whether the mechanics could be applied in the field of robotics.
According to Georgia Tech mechanical engineering Ph.D. student Andrew Schulz, “An elephant eats about 400 pounds of food a day, but very little is known about how they use their trunks to pick up lightweight food and water for 18 hours, every day. It turns out their trunks act like suitcases, capable of expanding when necessary.
Schulz and the Georgia Tech team worked with veterinarians at Zoo Atlanta to study how elephants eat different food types. For large rutabaga cubes, for example, elephants grab and collect them. On the other hand, they suck up smaller cubes and transfer the vegetables to their mouth.
“By investigating the mechanics and physics behind trunk muscle movements, we can apply the physical mechanisms, combinations of suction and grasping, to find new ways to build robots. In the meantime, the African elephant is now listed as endangered because of poaching and loss of habitat. Its trunk makes it a unique species to study. By learning more about them, we can learn how to better conserve elephants in the wild,” Schulz said.