Elephants are masters at using the hose; it is considered a complex tool due to its flexibility, length and the physics of flowing water.
Researchers studying three Asian elephants (The biggest elephant) at the Berlin Zoo were amazed at how easily they manipulated a hose to shower themselves and seemed to understand how to get the most out of it. They even seemed to play pranks on each other, stopping the flow in the middle of the shower, twisting their hoses or compressing them with their trunks.
To reach more distant parts of the body, the elephants used a lasso-like technique, holding the sleeve further from the end and swinging it on their back.
Michael Brecht At Humboldt University in Berlin, he says that the behavior of the elephants around the sleeves reminded the team of the way children play together.
“Elephants are very good with their trunks and we often wonder if this is related to the functional similarity of trunks and trunks,” he says.
Just as humans are left- or right-handed, individual African and Asian elephants are either left- or right-handed “trunks” and prefer to bend their trunk in one direction. The researchers noticed that the elephants also had a side preference when manipulating the sleeve. One of the elephants, named Mary, used her trunk to shower the right side of her body but used her sleeve more for the left.
Another elephant named Anchali displayed five different behaviors to obstruct the flow of water when Mary was trying to shower: cuffing, lifting, kinking, retying the kink, and compressing.
“This kind of sabotage-like behavior, if anything, has been seen in very few animals,” says Brecht.
Brecht’s earlier research suggests that they are elephant trunks one of the most sensitive body parts in the animal kingdom, it allows them to handle objects with a precision similar to that of a human hand.
“Research reiterates that elephants exhibit very sophisticated trunk behaviors,” he says.
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