SCIENCE LAB SCIENCE : CRITICAL ELEPHANT SENSOR

ELEPHANTS' whiskers are as vital as they are unusual : Every elephant has about 1,000 whiskers on its trunk. 

They play a crucial role for the animals, which have thick skin and poor eyesight. Elephants cannot rëgrow these hairs, meaning a lost one creates a permanent sensory blind spot on the trunk, which they use for for almost everything in daily life.

And as such an important feature, they are also unique among mammalian facial hairs.

'' Elephant whiskers are aliens,'' said Andrew Schulz, a mechanical engineer at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany.

In a study in the journal Science, Dr. Schulz and his colleagues identified the structural features that gave elephant whiskers a kind of '' built-in'' intelligence, providing the sensitivity that the mammals need to navigate their world.

WHILE other animals like rats can move their whiskers around, elephants lack the necessary muscles.  That leaves their whiskers essentially stationary, even if they protrude from the flexible trunk. This puzzled Dr. Schulz.

" If elephant trunk whiskers can’t move, there’s probably something built into them that allows them to" function in a way similar to mammals that whisk, Dr. Schulz said.

To find out, Dr. Schulz gathered engineers, biologists, material scientists and others to study whiskers from Asian elephants that died naturally.

Previous research on whiskers typically clamped both ends and examined the middle. Instead, the team studied changes along the entire length of each whisker, using electron microscopy, computer modeling and other techniques.

After the scientists had gathered data about geometry, stiffness and porosity, elephant whiskers looked unlike any other animal's.

The Publishing continues to Part  [ 2 ].  The World Students Society thanks Alexa Robles-Gil.