The fact that elephants have whiskers may not surprise you. The proximity of these sensory hairs, however, might.
“I have studied whiskers all my life, but I have never seen a mammalian mouth like this,” says Professor Michael Brecht from Humboldt-University Berlin, who directed a new study on elephant whiskers, published in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
Led by Hazel Yildiz from the Humboldt University of Berlin, the study highlights that most mammals have small, densely spaced whiskers (microvibrissae) around the front of their mouths, and large whiskers (macrovibrissae) located at the sides of their mouths. In elephants, however, this is reversed.
Why? Because they eat in a very different way to almost all other mammals.
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The vast majority of mammals consume food through the front of their mouths. Large whiskers on the sides help them locate the food; while small, sensory whiskers on the front pick up on the fine details of what they are about to eat, which helps them consume it.
Unlike most mammals, elephants insert food into their mouths laterally (the sides), the study explains, and that is why their whisker makeup is reversed; small, densely spaced whiskers are located on the sides, while the long whiskers are at the front.
"I have never seen a mammalian mouth like this,” remarks Professor Brecht.
The scientists also found that elephant whiskers vary from one individual to the next.
In the same way that humans are (usually) either 'left-handed' or 'right-handed', elephants also have a dominant side when it comes to using their trunks, placing food in either the left or right side. The researchers, who refer to this as 'trunkedness', explain that the whiskers on an elephant’s mouth will be worn-down on the side most frequently used by the trunk to deliver food.
Additional adaptations to the mouths of elephants reflect the evolution of their specialised method of eating, say the authors. They have an upper lip–nose fusion to the trunk, a super-flexible elongated lower jaw, and a loss of incisors.
The authors conclude that "our findings suggest elephant mouth architecture is highly exceptional and specialised for lateral food insertion, a hitherto unrecognised driver of elephant lateralisation."
The study was based on the whiskers of deceased wild African elephants, tissue samples and CT scans of elephant calves, and anatomical and behavioural measurements from captive Asian elephants.
Find out more about the study: Macrov confessing ibrissae and microvibrissae inversion and lateralization in elephants, by Yildiz and colleagues.
Main image: Dorsal view of an Asian elephant calf lower jaw. Blue insets indicate areas of sample collection for macrovibrissae (top inset) and for microvibrissae (bottom inset). Credit: Hazel Yildiz et al.
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