How is it that they can suck water into it and they also breathe through it?
When I get water in my nose I sneeze and it hurts. How does an elephant trunk work?
Thanks.
In: Biology
They don’t actually drink directly though the trunk. They suck up a noseful of water, then squirt it into their mouth.
They don’t drink through their nose. They suck water into their trunk, filling it, and then squirt it into their mouth. They’re using it as a container – like if you scoop glasses of water from a pond.
When you get water “up your nose”, making you sneeze, it’s gone further back. If you get a little water in the front part of your nostril (the nasal vestibule), it’s not a problem. For example, when you wash your face.
The elephant trunk has 40,000 separately controllable muscles, for comparison a human’s whole body has 600. It takes a lot of the elephant’s brain to control all these muscles, but it allow them to flex the trunk AND change the internal volume of the segments. This allows them to pull in water. Like you, they can breathe through their mouth or trunk, so drinking doesn’t involve holding their breath or sucking water up their trunk. They have the same sort of mechanism in the back of their throat to handle air vs water.
Trunks are really long. The water doesn’t reach the sneezy parts, it only goes halfway. Like sucking water up a straw but not all the way to your mouth.
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