Elephant whiskers make the trunk sensitive

Elephantwould it just be a skunk if it didn’t have a sensitive snout?

The question is wrongly posed.

Better to ask if an elephant would be an elephant without the hair on its trunk.

Rarely we know nothing at all about the whiskers on an elephant’s trunk.

Whiskers are so thin that they don’t show up in nature documentaries. In the zoo, right next to an elephant, hairs would already be parted.

There are about a thousand whisker hairs in the rump. With their help, the big animal controls its important organs and sensitizes its senses, even though it is otherwise thick-skinned.

An elephant’s trunk is so precise that an elephant can, for example, pick up a single one from the ground corn chip without breaking it. Or grab just one peanut.

Kärsen whisker hairs have now been closely studied.

The researchers analyzed the elephants’ approximately five-centimeter mustache hairs with an accuracy of one nanometer. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.

The hairs of the ferrets have the same properties as the whiskers of cats. However, they are somewhat different from the completely rigid felt hairs of cats and especially rats and mice.

An elephant whiskers have a stiff base but a soft tip.

The structure of the hair is somewhat tile-like and hollow. It allows the elephant to feel objects precisely.

This allows it to subtly identify the points touched by the whisker hairs. The hairs receive a slightly different signal from the object at different points.

In elephants, the mustache hair becomes soft, rubber-like at the tip. The transition from hard to soft offers elephants a way to touch targets.

Kärsä’s mustache hairs were closely examined by the German of the Max Planck Institute of intelligent systems department of haptic intelligence. The study was recently published science journal Science.

Haptic means tactile or touch-based sensing, such as feeling pressure and temperature.

Mustache hair gives elephants an amazing sense of touch. It mends the elephant’s thick skin and poor eyesight, says the newspaper The New York Times.

The elephant’s whiskers are like from an alien planet, says the magazine Andrew Schultzwho researches intelligent systems as an engineer at Max Planck.

In researchers there were also experts in neuroscience and materials science. They think about how the discoveries can be used when good sensors are developed for robots.