Smart Elephants Solve Puzzles With Their Trunks

Here are more reasons to love
and respect pachyderms.

Wild Asian Elephants Display Unique Puzzle-Solving Skills (City University of New York, 28 Sept 2023). In the embedded video clip, watch a wild Asian elephant in Thailand approach a food puzzle and solve it by opening three trap doors with her trunk.

Conducted at the Salakpra Wildlife Sanctuary in Kanchanaburi, Thailand, the study used motion-activated cameras to observe 77 wild Asian elephants who approached and decided whether to attempt opening puzzle boxes with three differently configured compartments that contained highly aromatic jackfruit. Depending on the compartment with which the elephant interacted, the jackfruit could be accessed by pulling on a chain so the door opened toward the elephant, pushing the door so that it swung open into the box, or sliding the door open to the right. The elephants had to independently interact with the puzzle boxes to discover how the compartments could be opened.

Five of 44 elephants stuck with it until they solved the puzzle. The researchers were surprised at the animals’ ability to innovate.

“This is the first research study to show that individual wild elephants have different willingness and abilities to problem solve in order to get food,” said the study’s lead author Sarah Jacobson, a psychology doctoral candidate studying animal cognition at the CUNY Graduate Center and Hunter College.

Giants with microscopic muscles: New findings reveal the structure of the dexterous elephant trunk (Humboldt University of Berlin via Phys.org, 28 Sept 2023). The ability of the Asian elephants to solve the puzzle was significantly due to their highly flexible trunk muscles. The researchers at Humboldt tell about this wonder of the animal kingdom:

With the most complex musculature known in animals, the trunk of the elephant moves elegantly without any bones. Instead, their trunk moves with muscles pushing against each other to provide rigidity and form joints. Even today, the number of muscles in the elephant trunk is unclear.

They proceeded to count, and totaled 90,000 muscles in the trunk, some of them microscopic in size.

Brecht notes, “We knew elephant trunks have many muscles, but the microscopic size of trunk tip muscles was a big surprise.” With so many tiny muscles, the elephant is able to perform the impressive, dexterous movement of its trunk.

Dense reconstruction of elephant trunk musculature (Longren et al., Current Biology, 26 Sept 2023). For those interested, here are the details of the research into the number, size, and characteristics of muscles that make the elephant trunk an engineering marvel that scientists would love to imitate in robotics.

Be sure to see Illustra Media’s wonderful short film on these charming giants and their toolkit, The Elephant’s Trunk. It was showcased here on 5 June 2023.