An elephant’s trunk is not just a muscular multitool — the skin plays a key role too.
Follow-up experiments stretching pieces of elephant skin in the lab showed the same peculiar phenomenon: The skin on the top and bottom of the trunk are two entirely different beasts. “Talk about a great day as a scientist!” Schulz says. “That’s when we really started to believe that what we were saying was true.”
The tough upper skin of an elephant’s trunk, which crumples into creases and crags like the folded furrows of a shar-pei puppy, isProceedings of the National Academy of SciencesWhen an elephant elongates its trunk, the upper skin stretches more than the skin on the underside. Green crosses represent initial positions on the skin. As the trunk extends, the crosses turn red and move to the right, indicating how much the skin stretched.
That extra stretch probably helps elephants reach down and wrap their trunks around a log or a tree branch, while the wrinkled skin underneath gives the animals a good grip, Schulz says. The team also observed that the trunk extends like a telescope, the tip reaching out first, followed by sections farther up. And at the trunk tip, it’s the skin that does most of the straining, not the muscle, mathematical modeling experiments suggest.. But skin has largely been overlooked, says Lucia Beccai, a soft roboticist at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa who wasn’t involved in the research. The new study “tells us that the structure of elephant skin is not all the same.
Artificial skin is often modeled after human skin, but researchers could learn a lot from other animals, Beccai says. Understanding how Kelly’s and Msholo’s folds and wrinkles stretch is “surely information that will improve the design of soft robots,” she says.
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