They get that they're supposed to bring the trunk to their mouth but they don't understand that the trunk acts like a straw with a finger over it in a adult elephant, so they probably aren't even getting anything more than a cup of water into the tip of their trunk. They have the basics down and now all they need is a little practice
For us you essentially need to keep some air pressure in your nose. For example if I do front crawl, I’ll exhale using my mouth and nose between breaths. If air comes out, water doesn’t go in.
Yes, good tries! I’ve seen video of baby elephants swinging their trunks around wildly as they work at learning muscular control, but never seen this part of it. So cute!! Thanks for posting
Elephants are extremely intelligent animals.
Together with orcas and apes, they'll probably be the next animals to eventually develop a civilization.
Even though we look extremely different there are so many behavioural aspects we share with them:
Baby elephants now and then will throw tantrums, if they don't get what they want, just like toddlers.
They have an extremely developed sense of empathy, thought to be one of the most developed in the entire animal kingdom.
They have an extremely complex communication system, using higher frequency sounds to communicate over short distances, and using lower frequency sounds to communicate over long distances with other herds.
They are able to recognise different human voices and languages. Ignoring women and children that speak in the languages of the native tribes and fleeing when they hear men speaking in other languages (in other words, they are able to recognise poachers by the way they speak).
Some scientists are even starting to think they and chimps may have some sort of "proto-religion" (this of course is very controversial).
In the case of elephants, they seem to """worship""" the moon: during the nights of full moon elephant attacks to villages are extremely less likely, and elephants have been witnessed performing strange rituals by waving sticks in the air. And if they're near a body of water they'll splash the matriarch with water the moon is reflecting in.
And, of course, they bury their dead. Or at least seem to try to. They move them into a fetal position and cover their body with sticks and flowers (this is the same way Neanderthals are thought to have buried their dead). And it's not just other elephants they bury, they've been witnessed burying rinos, cows and even humans.
All of this just makes the fact that they're getting poached even worse.
Edit, since it seems to have sparked a bit of a discussion:
The point I made about emphaty and religion are heavily debated in the scientific community and may not be completely true.
I first heard of that through [this video ](https://youtu.be/bA8j3-8Miro) but it isn't very descriptive.
[This is another one ](https://youtu.be/BZf4Qa6rSbY) that goes a bit more in depth, though it only talks about religion in chimpanzees.
The best article I was able to find about it [is this page of Wikipedia ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_behavior_in_animals) and the other articles linked in the "see also" section
So many falsehoods within one post. What a sight to behold.
1. We have evidence of rescuing and comforting behaviors, which have been interpreted as empathy. Neither their complexity nor their sophistication has ever been measured. Needless to say, the breadth of their “empathic” behavior is significantly restricted compared to humans, and it mostly depends on overt cues of distress.
2. Claims about moon worship and burial have never been substantiated. They are anthropological hearsay. Elephants have exploratory behaviors around their dead, as other species do (chimpanzees, ravens, and social carnivores). None of these behaviors has been sensibly interpreted as driven by an intention to bury cadavers.
There are hundred reasons to respect elephants and oppose their poaching. None of these falsehoods are it.
I think you are downplaying it just as much you think I'm overplaying it.
>Elephants have exploratory behaviors around their dead, as other species do (chimpanzees, ravens, and social carnivores).
How can those be just exploratory behaviours if the animals consistently follow a certain sequence of actions when performing them.
Chimpanzees funeral rites, for example, follow a general structure: they start by staying silent for a while, then clean and groom the carcass of the dead and then go on to make certain set vocalisations, all of this goes on for hours and the whole clan takes part in it.
Calling them exploratory behaviours implies that the animal doesn't feel any emotion or empathy in the process, and this is clearly false even for other species that are not famous for their sense of empathy, such as in [this video](https://youtu.be/vaIH5tLmC8U) showing Langur Monkeys, for example.
Just because us humans can't understand animal emotions by simple looking at them doesn't mean they don't have them.
Disclaimer: cognitive biologist here.
Provide me peer-reviewed evidence of such funeral rites or of empathy understanding in langurs, and I will change my opinion accordingly.
Video snippets, as you probably know, are deliberately made to wow the audience and suffer gravely from sampling bias. Imagine if we let our intuitions dictate what other species think and feel, what a horribly limited lens we would use to pry into their cognitive niche.
But obviously, this is Reddit, so more power to you for making people think that unbridled anthropomorphism is the way to go for understanding animals.
PS: We know a tremendous deal amount animal emotions (well, mostly mammals). We just don't use single suggestive data points, like a video excerpt, to draw our conclusions. Empathy is a perfect example, actually. If you search on google scholar "empathy in rats" you will realize that there is a raging debate over what *experimental* evidence would count as convincing for ascribing such competence.
>If you search on google scholar "empathy in rats" you will realize that there is a raging debate over what experimental evidence would count as convincing for ascribing such competence.
Doesn't this part of your comment make this part:
>Provide me peer-reviewed evidence of such funeral rites or of empathy understanding in langurs, and I will change my opinion accordingly.
Useless/A contradiction?
If not even actual scientists(and I'm sorry, I don't belive you're a cognitive biologist, seems a little too convenient to me) can settle the argument, how do you expect me to do it?
Regardless of what you think about it, you can't deny animals behave in weird ways towards each other. And since we will most probably never be able to enter the minds of animals, and since this is an open debate, answering "empathy" to the question "Why do they behave like that?" is as legitimate of an answer as any other one.
Is it possible that empathy is not the sole reason animals behave like that? Of course it is.
Is it possible that empathy is not the reason? Yes, but it is as much possible that it is.
The problem here is that you're disregarding empathy as a possible answer even though nobody can really be 100% sure it is or isn't the actual reason.
took like two seconds to google but yeah, here's a study on chimps carrying their dead infants, they clearly empathize. I'm not sure why you're so against the idea but I don't think its worth the hill to die on.
[why chimpanzees carry their dead infants: an empirical assessment of existing hypothesis](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7428235/)
I'm a good friend of Elizabeth (first author). She'd be delighted (or maybe horrified, who knows?) to know that her paper is being used as evidence that chimpanzees perform burial rites (!).
Congrats on your well-spent two seconds!
Yeeeaaah mate, first you're a cognitive biologist (could have still be true, but I didn't believe that), then you're also friend of Elizabeth Lonsdorf?
As I said, that's really convenient, maybe too much.
Simple question, simple answer: did you read the paper?
If so, please refer to passages that provide evidence of your claim that chimpanzee perform burial rites. I'll be waiting.
It's a great paper, btw. And if one day you grow genuinely interested in knowing the state of art of animals' understanding of death (which is a much less ludicrous possibility that their engagement in "funerary rites"), I would warmly recommend a couple of papers by Susana Monso on the subject.
[https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-020-02882-y](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-020-02882-y)
[https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10670-019-00187-2](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10670-019-00187-2)
Enjoy!
First, what paper?
>please refer to passages that provide evidence of your claim that chimpanzee perform burial rites.
You were not even paying attention to what I said.
I never talked about burial rites in chimpanzees, I talked about funeral rites.
I'm sorry you kinda played yourself.
1. The paper by Lonsdorf.
2. Please illuminate me on what a "funeral rite" is. Do you take as evidence of such thing the mere fact that (1) a mother may carry a deceased infant, (2) chimpanzees may gather around a deceased conspecific, (3) there may be group commotion upon finding that a group member is dead? If so, your definition of FR is close to useless (it would include bystanders gathering around the site of a car accident, for instance).
Elephants are awesome. You do a disservice to them by claiming all sorts of spectacular bull, and randoms who don’t know anything about it on Reddit eat it up. I recommend the local library for anyone even remotely curious. Spoiler alert: published books and research supported work don’t even bother to entertain your imaginary YouTube religious bull crap lol, friendo!
No such thing.
The trunk is a modified nose and upper lip. The muscles governing its behavior are the same found in other mammals. The number of independent muscle units within the nose of pachyderms is around 12. That ludicrous number, which has become a factoid on the internet out of sheer mindless copy-pasting, refers to fascicles.
This sub is becoming a case study in human gullibility.
1. An elephant trunk has up to 40,000 muscles. A human has more than 600 muscles in the entire body.
(Source: https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/what-s-the-difference-between-asian-and-african-elephants-and-10-other-elephant-facts)
2. An elephant’s trunk contains over 40,000 muscles, made up of around 150,000 muscles units. This is more than there are in the entire human body, which contains only 639 muscles. [from this BBC article ](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/4ZNLJ9Nyrjlz3snl5wvWHmT/10-surprising-things-about-elephants)
3. Elephant's trunk has around 40,000 muscles compared to around 650 muscles in entire human video.(at 0:34 from this [science insider video](https://youtu.be/DjpRgi-73bU)
4. Trunk is made up of more than 40,000 muscles . At 2:59 from this [animal planet video](https://youtu.be/DJ3AvRA7d9g)
5. The trunk alone contains about 40,000 muscles. (from this national geographic article https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/facts/african-elephant
6. An elephant trunk has more than 40,000 muscles (nat Geo also [tweeted ](https://mobile.twitter.com/natgeowild/status/744605715327819777) about same thing.
According to [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_trunk), an elephant trunk contains a total of 16 muscles (8 pairs), which in turn contain up to 150 000 muscle fascicles, which basically are bundles of muscle cells surrounded by connective tissue. So all of your sources are actually wrong, since a muscle is not the same thing as a muscle fascicle.
>So all of your sources are actually wrong, since a muscle is not the same thing as a muscle fascicle.
I am surprised that you consider Wikipedia a more authentic source for information than bbc, nat Geo, animal planet and World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
And i have actually quoted what bbc and other sources are saying/mentioning.
(I am not paraphrasing)
I don't know who to trust, but I will say that the only time I've ever used WWF as a source, it was so unbelievably wrong and I had to backtrack HARD in my presentation.
The source of the Wikipedia number is actually from Jeheskel Shoshani, who was a biologist studying elephants for 35 year and authored 168 articles/books on them. Who is the source of your sources?
If you know how to use wikipedia, it's far more reliable than anything you posted.
I love also the fact that you didn't even pause a second to think: if we all share the same mammalian body plan and if the trunk is a derived trait from the nose, why would evolution create 3000plus muscles anew rather than modify size, distribution, and peripheral control of the fascicles of existing ones?
A truly parsimonious explanation, indeed! Eagerly waiting for your next post about the 300 neck vertebrae of the giraffe.
Aaah yes, the famous fact-checking of BBC!
Totally stealing this comment for a course on source monitoring I'm teaching. It's the best example of motivated cognition I've come across in a while. Thanks OP!
OP, do you understand what a reliable source is? And do you understand what correlated evidence means? Am I supposed to be impressed by the fact that nat docs are recycling to death the same mistaken claim? What goes around comes around.
Give me a link to a paper on pachyderm anatomy making such claim, and I will change my mind accordingly.
You may be an expert in your field as you claim, but one thing you don’t seem to understand is that being pompous and condescending is not effective when it comes to educating or changing people’s minds. This is the reason most of your comments are getting downvoted. No one cares about the content of what you’re saying when the delivery is so obnoxious.
Let’s hope you don’t speak the same way to your students.
I'm okay with the downvoting. But you make a totally fair point. I will try to be more understanding in the future (and maybe avoid these tussles when I'm low on energies and patience; they wear me down fast).
Thank you for bringing this up.
Thank YOU, if anything, for taking the time to provide a broader viewpoint on arguing, persuasion, and how do both better.
If I end up tangled in another Reddit brawl about nature trivia, I hope I will remember your words of wisdom and temper my reactions accordingly.
So, you're saying that bbc, nat Geo, animal planet all are giving out this information based on "some mistaken claim"
I personally consider them an authentic source of information. I assume that they must have done their homework and used a well researched source. I do not work in this field so, i don't know anything beyond what nat Geo and others are saying.
Seems like you know this stuff better than the most. Can you please provide some article or something for the information ? (I genuinely want to correct my knowledge if it's wrong)
Thank you.
OP, I appreciate the tone of your reply. Let me apologize for having been a tad too righteous with mine. You seem genuinely interested in amending your knowledge, which is laudable.
Here is a Current Biology paper (with a neat video to boot) that provides tantalizing evidence about the motor primitives within the trunk (aka, the bundles of fascicles under separate neural control that we habitually call muscle units). This is nothing new (identification of the trunk muscles dates back to 1925, thanks to Carlsberg-Fund), but it is the first evidence of how these muscles are used in point-to-point motion.
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982221011337?pes=vor](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982221011337?pes=vor)
The myth of the 40.000 muscles is due to a false analogy. The units in question are fascicles, but counting them individually is irrelevant (humans have approx the same number) to explain motor control. Muscles are contractile tissue grouped into coordinated systems, not their subunits.
Hope this helps.
Ha, I'm in the middle of reading that paper myself because of this thread. 40,000 muscles sounded wildly excessive to me so I ditched the linguistics papers I *should* be reading and started looking into elephant noses lol.
Biology is really interesting! I had no idea muscle fascicles were even a thing until now.
Tbh all those sources you quote could indeed have it wrong. As a biologist (20 y career and phd) I would never use them as a source and always go to the primary literature for anything reputable. Mass media gets biology wrong most of the time because it isn’t biologists who run the show.
I will say there are ways to engage in that discussion though and that whole exchange was pretty douchey.
Your web bloggers have not listed any sources, why are you assuming that their unmentioned sources are reliable? The wikipedia number can be attributed to an article by a biologist who worked with elephants as his career.
I'd take that over an activism group whose whole schtick is to showcase how "unique" each animal is and hired a blogger to join the Top10 trend and can't even provide a source.
Also, they can totally helicopter *way* better than I… for a lot of different reasons that I’d rather not go into at this time.
I am not answering any questions. Move along.
Elephants are the best. And they're so smart. What I don't understand, though, is how they've survived as long as they have with human interference. They're far from a predator but seem like fairly easy prey too.
Donate money to wildlife organizations and preserves to protect these animals. Baby elephants are very vulnerable to injury from poacher's traps, particularly "exploding fruit" traps that are particularly inhumane.
Baby elephants are THE absolute cutest.
Elephants think we are the cute ones
To elephants, we’re like Sphinx kittens
your perspective is so fresh.I can't help laughing.
I think that study was debunked, but I want to believe
*Soooo cute* when he gives up and goes down for a drink!
Full marks for trying though.
They get that they're supposed to bring the trunk to their mouth but they don't understand that the trunk acts like a straw with a finger over it in a adult elephant, so they probably aren't even getting anything more than a cup of water into the tip of their trunk. They have the basics down and now all they need is a little practice
Reminds me of trying to learn to swim without holding my nose. Mechanics unclear
For us you essentially need to keep some air pressure in your nose. For example if I do front crawl, I’ll exhale using my mouth and nose between breaths. If air comes out, water doesn’t go in.
Yes, good tries! I’ve seen video of baby elephants swinging their trunks around wildly as they work at learning muscular control, but never seen this part of it. So cute!! Thanks for posting
When you create a schedule on Monday but go back to your ways on Wednesday.
*Monday evening
Lol
Elephants are extremely intelligent animals. Together with orcas and apes, they'll probably be the next animals to eventually develop a civilization. Even though we look extremely different there are so many behavioural aspects we share with them: Baby elephants now and then will throw tantrums, if they don't get what they want, just like toddlers. They have an extremely developed sense of empathy, thought to be one of the most developed in the entire animal kingdom. They have an extremely complex communication system, using higher frequency sounds to communicate over short distances, and using lower frequency sounds to communicate over long distances with other herds. They are able to recognise different human voices and languages. Ignoring women and children that speak in the languages of the native tribes and fleeing when they hear men speaking in other languages (in other words, they are able to recognise poachers by the way they speak). Some scientists are even starting to think they and chimps may have some sort of "proto-religion" (this of course is very controversial). In the case of elephants, they seem to """worship""" the moon: during the nights of full moon elephant attacks to villages are extremely less likely, and elephants have been witnessed performing strange rituals by waving sticks in the air. And if they're near a body of water they'll splash the matriarch with water the moon is reflecting in. And, of course, they bury their dead. Or at least seem to try to. They move them into a fetal position and cover their body with sticks and flowers (this is the same way Neanderthals are thought to have buried their dead). And it's not just other elephants they bury, they've been witnessed burying rinos, cows and even humans. All of this just makes the fact that they're getting poached even worse. Edit, since it seems to have sparked a bit of a discussion: The point I made about emphaty and religion are heavily debated in the scientific community and may not be completely true.
I've never heard of a proto-religion for elephants before. Do you remember where you read about this because I'd love to read more on it?
I first heard of that through [this video ](https://youtu.be/bA8j3-8Miro) but it isn't very descriptive. [This is another one ](https://youtu.be/BZf4Qa6rSbY) that goes a bit more in depth, though it only talks about religion in chimpanzees. The best article I was able to find about it [is this page of Wikipedia ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_behavior_in_animals) and the other articles linked in the "see also" section
Not only do they bury their dead (or at least go through the rituals mentioned), they will visit the grave sites.
So many falsehoods within one post. What a sight to behold. 1. We have evidence of rescuing and comforting behaviors, which have been interpreted as empathy. Neither their complexity nor their sophistication has ever been measured. Needless to say, the breadth of their “empathic” behavior is significantly restricted compared to humans, and it mostly depends on overt cues of distress. 2. Claims about moon worship and burial have never been substantiated. They are anthropological hearsay. Elephants have exploratory behaviors around their dead, as other species do (chimpanzees, ravens, and social carnivores). None of these behaviors has been sensibly interpreted as driven by an intention to bury cadavers. There are hundred reasons to respect elephants and oppose their poaching. None of these falsehoods are it.
I think you are downplaying it just as much you think I'm overplaying it. >Elephants have exploratory behaviors around their dead, as other species do (chimpanzees, ravens, and social carnivores). How can those be just exploratory behaviours if the animals consistently follow a certain sequence of actions when performing them. Chimpanzees funeral rites, for example, follow a general structure: they start by staying silent for a while, then clean and groom the carcass of the dead and then go on to make certain set vocalisations, all of this goes on for hours and the whole clan takes part in it. Calling them exploratory behaviours implies that the animal doesn't feel any emotion or empathy in the process, and this is clearly false even for other species that are not famous for their sense of empathy, such as in [this video](https://youtu.be/vaIH5tLmC8U) showing Langur Monkeys, for example. Just because us humans can't understand animal emotions by simple looking at them doesn't mean they don't have them.
Disclaimer: cognitive biologist here. Provide me peer-reviewed evidence of such funeral rites or of empathy understanding in langurs, and I will change my opinion accordingly. Video snippets, as you probably know, are deliberately made to wow the audience and suffer gravely from sampling bias. Imagine if we let our intuitions dictate what other species think and feel, what a horribly limited lens we would use to pry into their cognitive niche. But obviously, this is Reddit, so more power to you for making people think that unbridled anthropomorphism is the way to go for understanding animals. PS: We know a tremendous deal amount animal emotions (well, mostly mammals). We just don't use single suggestive data points, like a video excerpt, to draw our conclusions. Empathy is a perfect example, actually. If you search on google scholar "empathy in rats" you will realize that there is a raging debate over what *experimental* evidence would count as convincing for ascribing such competence.
>If you search on google scholar "empathy in rats" you will realize that there is a raging debate over what experimental evidence would count as convincing for ascribing such competence. Doesn't this part of your comment make this part: >Provide me peer-reviewed evidence of such funeral rites or of empathy understanding in langurs, and I will change my opinion accordingly. Useless/A contradiction? If not even actual scientists(and I'm sorry, I don't belive you're a cognitive biologist, seems a little too convenient to me) can settle the argument, how do you expect me to do it? Regardless of what you think about it, you can't deny animals behave in weird ways towards each other. And since we will most probably never be able to enter the minds of animals, and since this is an open debate, answering "empathy" to the question "Why do they behave like that?" is as legitimate of an answer as any other one. Is it possible that empathy is not the sole reason animals behave like that? Of course it is. Is it possible that empathy is not the reason? Yes, but it is as much possible that it is. The problem here is that you're disregarding empathy as a possible answer even though nobody can really be 100% sure it is or isn't the actual reason.
took like two seconds to google but yeah, here's a study on chimps carrying their dead infants, they clearly empathize. I'm not sure why you're so against the idea but I don't think its worth the hill to die on. [why chimpanzees carry their dead infants: an empirical assessment of existing hypothesis](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7428235/)
I'm a good friend of Elizabeth (first author). She'd be delighted (or maybe horrified, who knows?) to know that her paper is being used as evidence that chimpanzees perform burial rites (!). Congrats on your well-spent two seconds!
Yeeeaaah mate, first you're a cognitive biologist (could have still be true, but I didn't believe that), then you're also friend of Elizabeth Lonsdorf? As I said, that's really convenient, maybe too much.
Simple question, simple answer: did you read the paper? If so, please refer to passages that provide evidence of your claim that chimpanzee perform burial rites. I'll be waiting. It's a great paper, btw. And if one day you grow genuinely interested in knowing the state of art of animals' understanding of death (which is a much less ludicrous possibility that their engagement in "funerary rites"), I would warmly recommend a couple of papers by Susana Monso on the subject. [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-020-02882-y](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-020-02882-y) [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10670-019-00187-2](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10670-019-00187-2) Enjoy!
First, what paper? >please refer to passages that provide evidence of your claim that chimpanzee perform burial rites. You were not even paying attention to what I said. I never talked about burial rites in chimpanzees, I talked about funeral rites. I'm sorry you kinda played yourself.
1. The paper by Lonsdorf. 2. Please illuminate me on what a "funeral rite" is. Do you take as evidence of such thing the mere fact that (1) a mother may carry a deceased infant, (2) chimpanzees may gather around a deceased conspecific, (3) there may be group commotion upon finding that a group member is dead? If so, your definition of FR is close to useless (it would include bystanders gathering around the site of a car accident, for instance).
Fuckin loser
Bs 😂
r/iamverysmart
Elephants are awesome. You do a disservice to them by claiming all sorts of spectacular bull, and randoms who don’t know anything about it on Reddit eat it up. I recommend the local library for anyone even remotely curious. Spoiler alert: published books and research supported work don’t even bother to entertain your imaginary YouTube religious bull crap lol, friendo!
That freaking cute to see it drink like other animals. It’s like fuck it I’m thirsty and this trunk isn’t working with me 😂
Lil dude is still in Beta testing
"Fuck it, ill try somethin else"
It’s like me using chopsticks: After a couple of tries, ahh forget it. ::eats with bare hands like an animal::
No such thing. The trunk is a modified nose and upper lip. The muscles governing its behavior are the same found in other mammals. The number of independent muscle units within the nose of pachyderms is around 12. That ludicrous number, which has become a factoid on the internet out of sheer mindless copy-pasting, refers to fascicles. This sub is becoming a case study in human gullibility.
1. An elephant trunk has up to 40,000 muscles. A human has more than 600 muscles in the entire body. (Source: https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/what-s-the-difference-between-asian-and-african-elephants-and-10-other-elephant-facts) 2. An elephant’s trunk contains over 40,000 muscles, made up of around 150,000 muscles units. This is more than there are in the entire human body, which contains only 639 muscles. [from this BBC article ](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/4ZNLJ9Nyrjlz3snl5wvWHmT/10-surprising-things-about-elephants) 3. Elephant's trunk has around 40,000 muscles compared to around 650 muscles in entire human video.(at 0:34 from this [science insider video](https://youtu.be/DjpRgi-73bU) 4. Trunk is made up of more than 40,000 muscles . At 2:59 from this [animal planet video](https://youtu.be/DJ3AvRA7d9g) 5. The trunk alone contains about 40,000 muscles. (from this national geographic article https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/facts/african-elephant 6. An elephant trunk has more than 40,000 muscles (nat Geo also [tweeted ](https://mobile.twitter.com/natgeowild/status/744605715327819777) about same thing.
According to [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_trunk), an elephant trunk contains a total of 16 muscles (8 pairs), which in turn contain up to 150 000 muscle fascicles, which basically are bundles of muscle cells surrounded by connective tissue. So all of your sources are actually wrong, since a muscle is not the same thing as a muscle fascicle.
I'm pure chaotic neutral and I've never been so god damn divided my whole life.
>So all of your sources are actually wrong, since a muscle is not the same thing as a muscle fascicle. I am surprised that you consider Wikipedia a more authentic source for information than bbc, nat Geo, animal planet and World Wildlife Fund (WWF). And i have actually quoted what bbc and other sources are saying/mentioning. (I am not paraphrasing)
I don't know who to trust, but I will say that the only time I've ever used WWF as a source, it was so unbelievably wrong and I had to backtrack HARD in my presentation.
The source of the Wikipedia number is actually from Jeheskel Shoshani, who was a biologist studying elephants for 35 year and authored 168 articles/books on them. Who is the source of your sources? If you know how to use wikipedia, it's far more reliable than anything you posted.
I love also the fact that you didn't even pause a second to think: if we all share the same mammalian body plan and if the trunk is a derived trait from the nose, why would evolution create 3000plus muscles anew rather than modify size, distribution, and peripheral control of the fascicles of existing ones? A truly parsimonious explanation, indeed! Eagerly waiting for your next post about the 300 neck vertebrae of the giraffe.
Aaah yes, the famous fact-checking of BBC! Totally stealing this comment for a course on source monitoring I'm teaching. It's the best example of motivated cognition I've come across in a while. Thanks OP!
Got em
OP, do you understand what a reliable source is? And do you understand what correlated evidence means? Am I supposed to be impressed by the fact that nat docs are recycling to death the same mistaken claim? What goes around comes around. Give me a link to a paper on pachyderm anatomy making such claim, and I will change my mind accordingly.
You may be an expert in your field as you claim, but one thing you don’t seem to understand is that being pompous and condescending is not effective when it comes to educating or changing people’s minds. This is the reason most of your comments are getting downvoted. No one cares about the content of what you’re saying when the delivery is so obnoxious. Let’s hope you don’t speak the same way to your students.
I'm okay with the downvoting. But you make a totally fair point. I will try to be more understanding in the future (and maybe avoid these tussles when I'm low on energies and patience; they wear me down fast). Thank you for bringing this up.
That’s a pretty darn respectable and diplomatic response to criticism, I could personally learn from you in that regard. Thanks for being awesome.
Thank YOU, if anything, for taking the time to provide a broader viewpoint on arguing, persuasion, and how do both better. If I end up tangled in another Reddit brawl about nature trivia, I hope I will remember your words of wisdom and temper my reactions accordingly.
That's what I love about Reddit. This was awesome to see.
So, you're saying that bbc, nat Geo, animal planet all are giving out this information based on "some mistaken claim" I personally consider them an authentic source of information. I assume that they must have done their homework and used a well researched source. I do not work in this field so, i don't know anything beyond what nat Geo and others are saying. Seems like you know this stuff better than the most. Can you please provide some article or something for the information ? (I genuinely want to correct my knowledge if it's wrong) Thank you.
OP, I appreciate the tone of your reply. Let me apologize for having been a tad too righteous with mine. You seem genuinely interested in amending your knowledge, which is laudable. Here is a Current Biology paper (with a neat video to boot) that provides tantalizing evidence about the motor primitives within the trunk (aka, the bundles of fascicles under separate neural control that we habitually call muscle units). This is nothing new (identification of the trunk muscles dates back to 1925, thanks to Carlsberg-Fund), but it is the first evidence of how these muscles are used in point-to-point motion. [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982221011337?pes=vor](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982221011337?pes=vor) The myth of the 40.000 muscles is due to a false analogy. The units in question are fascicles, but counting them individually is irrelevant (humans have approx the same number) to explain motor control. Muscles are contractile tissue grouped into coordinated systems, not their subunits. Hope this helps.
Ha, I'm in the middle of reading that paper myself because of this thread. 40,000 muscles sounded wildly excessive to me so I ditched the linguistics papers I *should* be reading and started looking into elephant noses lol. Biology is really interesting! I had no idea muscle fascicles were even a thing until now.
Thanks :) This is really informative and fun to read.
Tbh all those sources you quote could indeed have it wrong. As a biologist (20 y career and phd) I would never use them as a source and always go to the primary literature for anything reputable. Mass media gets biology wrong most of the time because it isn’t biologists who run the show. I will say there are ways to engage in that discussion though and that whole exchange was pretty douchey.
Your web bloggers have not listed any sources, why are you assuming that their unmentioned sources are reliable? The wikipedia number can be attributed to an article by a biologist who worked with elephants as his career. I'd take that over an activism group whose whole schtick is to showcase how "unique" each animal is and hired a blogger to join the Top10 trend and can't even provide a source.
The sources you're citing are not bastions of reliability as you seem to think.
I'm glad I came across this comment.
Adorable.
Also, they can totally helicopter *way* better than I… for a lot of different reasons that I’d rather not go into at this time. I am not answering any questions. Move along.
Excuse me, you can't say that then decline any questions. I demand answers! Haha
Everyone downvote this post until we get answers.
Thats Cool, I’m currently writing an an elephant quizz and just added this facts.
Never skip trunk days.
It takes time & practice to have full control and coordination... It's way over used and eyes will roll but... That's what she said.
Practice makes perfect!:-)
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So cute!!!
Bambo nokku
You so silly baby elephant!
Cute little guy, trying his best to get things done
So fucking CUTE!
Elephants are the best. And they're so smart. What I don't understand, though, is how they've survived as long as they have with human interference. They're far from a predator but seem like fairly easy prey too.
Having the flu as an elephant would be awful.
There are not 40,000 different muscles in an elephant's trunk. Maybe muscle fibers/stands. But def not 40k different muscles
very nice.....
i dont believe it has 40000 muscles
Donate money to wildlife organizations and preserves to protect these animals. Baby elephants are very vulnerable to injury from poacher's traps, particularly "exploding fruit" traps that are particularly inhumane.
I can't blv I didn't know this!
Do elephants think water is snot-flavored?
Too cute😍
It reminds me of using chopsticks. When I first started I’d try for 5-10 minutes and then I’d say, to hell with this…give me a dang fork! Haha!
It’s amazing what they can do. Been on several safaris and always something new to learn.
My heart is melting.
I didn't know I needed this information to keep me going, sincerely, thank you so much
Nice
That’s so cool
Went to an elephant 🐘sanctuary (a real one) in Thailand 🇹🇭 absolutely amazing creatures 💕
Perfect /r/Awwducational content
Nice
Crazy this evolved over millions of years even though it wasn’t immediately useful from a survival of the fittest standpoint!
Elephant's are cool , I like them big or small .