If you've ever watched an elephant perform a delicate task with its trunk, the secret might lie in something easy to miss: whiskers. New research in Science finds that the hundreds of fine hairs coating an elephant's trunk are among the most advanced sensory whiskers known, turning the trunk into a high-precision touch tool. Using microscopes, computer modeling, and a 3D-printed "whisker wand," researchers showed that these hairs help elephants detect motion, handle objects, and solve complex tasks despite elephants' poor eyesight and thick skin, reports the Washington Post.
"Elephant whiskers are aliens," says Andrew Schulz of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany, per the New York Times. "If you try to compare them to any other whisker structure, they're basically different in every single way." Unlike the circular whiskers of rats, Asian elephants' whiskers are shaped like grass blades, full of tiny pores that let them flex without snapping. What's more, rats can move their whiskers—it's called whisking—but elephants cannot. Instead, their unique structure provides the edge.
Most striking is what the team calls a "stiffness gradient": the whiskers are firm at the base and soft at the tip, allowing them to vibrate across a wide range of frequencies and feed detailed signals to nerve cells at the roots. The work could inform better touch sensors for robots, but researchers say it also opens a window into how elephants sense their surroundings, find food, communicate within herds—and, occasionally, deliver a surprisingly gentle trunk hug.
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