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
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.
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