A study led by Hazal Yildiz from the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin and Humboldt University of Berlin, in collaboration with an international research team, reveals unusual aspects of the organization of an elephant's mouth that may be related to their strong side preferences. The authors, who observed Asian elephants at the Berlin Zoo, noted that the whiskers around an elephant's mouth differ from those of other mammals. The study was recently published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
Most mammals have short, closely spaced whiskers (called microvibrissae) around the front of their mouth, which help with fine control while feeding. On the sides of the mouth, most mammals have longer whiskers (called macrovibrissae) that help them roughly position their mouth towards food and other stimuli. Surprisingly, this pattern is reversed in elephants: they have short, closely spaced whiskers on the sides of their mouth, and longer, less densely packed whiskers at the front.
Following this observation, the authors show that elephants don't feed frontally like other mammals, but rather from the side, where the small, closely spaced whiskers are located. The researchers thus hypothesize that this lateral feeding behavior may encourage the specialization of elephants into right- and left-trunked individuals. "I’ve studied whiskers in mammals extensively, but I’ve never seen a mouth region like that of elephants," said Michael Brecht, a member of the NeuroCure Excellence Cluster and professor of animal physiology/systems neurobiology and neural computation at Humboldt University of Berlin, who led the study. Additionally, the authors suggest that the fact elephants don't take food directly into their mouth, but rather through their trunk, could also contribute to their right- or left-trunked behavior.
Source: Press release from Humboldt University
Publication: Hazal Yildiz, Olivia Heise, Ben Gerhardt, Guido Fritsch, Rolf Becker, Andreas Ochs, Florian Sicks, Peter Buss, Lin-Mari de Klerk-Lorist, Thomas Hildebrandt, Michael Brecht: Macrovibrissae and microvibrissae inversion and lateralization in elephants
Contact: Prof. Dr. Michael Brecht Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin, Humboldt University of Berlin Email: michael.brecht@bccn-berlin.de
