Advertisement
They filled an aquarium with a certain volume of water and measured how long the elephant spent inhaling water from the tank via its trunk. They then measured the volume of water left in the aquarium after the experiment.
The researchers calculated that elephants suck up water with what would be an equivalent air velocity of 150 metres per second. “That is around 30 times the speed of the human sneeze,” says Schulz – when we sneeze, we exhale air with a velocity of 4.5 metres per second.
Schulz and his team also estimated the trunk’s capacity by measuring the internal volume of a trunk that came from a 38-year-old African elephant that had been put down because of medical issues. This trunk was a similar size and weight to the trunk of the elephant in the Atlanta zoo.