Elephants Are Either Left Or Right-Trunked, And Their Wrinkles Reveal Which One

Elephants are pretty amazing, aren’t they?

Aside from their famously impressive memory, the highly social animals can also communicate using a pitch we humans can’t hear. 

The world’s largest land mammals’ trunks can hold up to eight litres of water and can even be used as a snorkel.

But according to a study published today in the Royal Society Open Science, wrinkles on elephants’ trunks can reveal the left or right “trunkedness” of the majestic animals. 

Wait ― elephants are left or right.. trunked?

The Humboldt University of Berlin researchers who conducted the study said that elephants “prefer a direction when executing complex motion tasks” with their trunks. 

We knew this before the study, but its authors found something new ― namely,  that their preference was reflected in the wrinkle changes on the sides of the elephants’ trunks they studied. 

When looking at the trunks of both living and dead African and Asian elephants, the scientists saw that “left-trunked” elephants would have longer whiskers and about 10% more wrinkles on the left side of their trunks. 

Elephants have about a 50:50 chance of being either left or right “trunked,” the paper reads.

So it’s not surprising the scientists found half of elephants’ trunks had more wrinkles on the right hand side, and half on the left.

“Elephant trunks are their primary tool of manipulation and interaction with their environment and are essential for sensory perception,” the paper says, adding that “a wrinkle on the elephant trunk allows the trunk to stretch while maintaining protection.”

Anything else? 

The researchers found that Asian elephants had an awful lot more wrinkles at the tops of their trunks thanks to having more grooves in the deeper layers of the body part than African elephants did. 

They think this could be why Asian elephants, who unlike their African cousins often wrap their tunks around trees, have such “phenomenally flexible” trunks. 

They also found that elephant foetus’ trunk wrinkles double every 20 days in the species’ early exponential days in the womb. 

“Later wrinkles are added slowly, but at a faster rate in Asian than African elephants,” they add. 

Who nose what they’ll discover next...