Mineko and Suzuko are female Asian elephants at Kamine Zoo in Japan and can use their trunks to blast air at inaccessible food, driving it within reach.
Way back in the 19th century, a visitor to the Exeter Exchange on the Strand in London witnessed the celebrity elephant Chunee doing something similar. Edward Jesse, a writer, was handing potatoes to the 7-tonne animal, when one of the veggies – “a round one” – fell to the floor just out of the elephant’s reach. “After several ineffectual efforts, he at last blew the potato against the opposite wall with sufficient force to make it rebound, and he then, without difficulty secured it,” he wrote in his 1834 book Gleanings in Natural History.
A little later, Charles Darwin made a similar observation with a bull elephant at London Zoo. “He blows through his trunk on the ground beyond the object, so that the current reflected on all sides may drive the object within his reach,” he wrote in The Descent of Man.
Researchers in Japan have now conducted a more detailed investigation of this behaviour, by setting two female elephants at Kamine Zoo a range of food-blasting challenges. Typically, it took the elephants just 3 blows to bring a food item within reach. Mineko was more skillful than Suzuko with her trunk. The difference was particularly noticeable in the case of a small stick of bamboo, which Mineko could reliably blast some 80 cm in a single puff. Suzuko didn’t have quite the knack, only rolling the bamboo about 10 cm at a time.
“The use of breath for driving food is probably unique to elephants, due to their dexterous trunks,” write Kaori Minzuno and colleagues in the journal Animal Cognition. It might not quite be an example of tool use in animals. But, the authors suggest, it’s analogous to the way that archerfish target insects with jets of water and humpback whales deploy bubbles to “herd” their fishy prey.
Mizuno, K. et al. (2015), Asian elephants acquire inaccessible food by blowing, Animal Cognition, DOI 10.1007/s10071-015-0929-2
