this episode is sponsored by brilliant learn to think this right here what looks like a grape with a sinus infection is actually a baby elephant just about ready to will be dropped from five feet and it has start things off with a bang to the head it's an exciting event for everyone the whole herd gathers around and celebrates it's quite cute and loud but they should celebrate that baby's been up in there for almost two years so when it comes out it's fairly well baked it takes a minute or two to get used to its
new surroundings I mean he's not in Kansas anymore you know if Kansas were a mucous-filled placental Sac inside the uterus of an elephant but in no time at all this baby is standing up on its own first things first it's guided to the nipples we should all be so lucky and there they are could benefit from a dab of lotion by the looks of it for the next three to four years the baby will nurse in its mother's care supported by the other females in the herd sometimes it takes a village these elephant babies can
sometimes be a handful look at this one it's throwing an all-out tantrum probably just passed by a Chuck E cheese that demon robotic mouse that calls the children but it's a good thing that there's some time for the baby to learn how to Elephant you gotta get your feet right but there's more subtle things like caring for your skin elephants have quite the beauty regimen luckily they use found foundation and powders that are quite cheap and readily available throw a bit of dirt on the back maybe a mud bath it's worth it because listen this
is no ordinary skin now up close it doesn't seem like their routine is addressing the wrinkles but in this case the wrinkling is on purpose elephant's skin doesn't Just Have Wrinkles there's wrinkles on the wrinkles and the closer you look the more you find unlike our skin which flakes off when it dyes elephant skin sticks around and forms thicker and thicker layers as they age and this wrinkled mess can do some magic tricks look at that it's amazing it's like a giant elephant-shaped sponge and having skin that can hold on to water like that is
very important elephants can get hot very hot they have the highest ratio of volume to surface area of any land animal too much body and not enough skin surface to cool off they don't have sweat glands except for a couple between their toes those aren't gonna do so they have some other tricks for one they have these little hairs all over their body not like a luxurious Mane more like the smattering follicular landscape of a testicle one question though is why do they have hair at all doesn't hair make you warmer now you might think
that it's just evolutionary leftovers sort of a slowly balding woolly mammoth but it turns out that when hair density drops below a certain threshold handing hair switches from something that keeps you warm to something that helps you cool off and it appears that that's what's happening the hairs themselves help get rid of the Heat their giant ears also act as heat exchangers waving them around cools down the blood that runs through them I know what you're thinking naughty bits those veins there remind me of the veins in a human testicle which also shed heat to
keep sperm from overheating elephant testicles are inside the body in basically the hottest place there's something called the hot testicle hypothesis it's a good band name it says that elephants might not get cancer because they've evolved extra proteins that are constantly protecting and repairing heat damaged sperm anyway I digress wait is this one flipping us off and we're totally getting flipped off by an elephant trunk right about ner but let me tell you those trunks are quite something Segway you know in the womb they actually have an upper lip that's separate from their nose but
those fuse together to form the trunk here try pushing your upper lip forward while flaring your nostrils hold that right well nothing to do with an elephant but you look like an idiot the trunk is made up of connective tissue a tiny bit of fat and tens of thousands of muscles that go the long way the short way in roundsy bouncy much like the tongue the trunk contains no bones and no cartilage but by coordinating those muscles it can do all sorts of things it's quite strong especially nearer up to the top you can see
one working out here must be a warm-up set because they can lift up to 700 pounds which is the equivalent of 701 pound weights for those of you who are into the gym things the trunk is also quite stretchy stretchy the skin and connective tissue on the top surface of the trucker is stretchier than the bottom while the bottom is stiffer stronger and more grabby Grammy the trunk is aligned with special sensory hairs called the brissie on the bottom of the trunk they form rows on either side the science hippies think that this helps them
balance things in the curl of their trunk like this watermelon but the tip the tip has the most hairs and is the most sensitive as tips are want to be depending on the species the trunk ends in one or two things that basically act like fingers and I'm sure that science hippies attempted to fake This research with hand puppets the combination of a flexible trunk in these fingerlings means that they can pick things up in all sorts of ways depending on their shape and how big they are and those finger parts are capable of some
very fine movements look at this one peeling a banana nah not exactly how I do it it gets the job done and look at this one delicately picking up a tortilla without breaking it now the trunk is in the hollow tube those two nostrils run down the length of it and that means it can get Sagi saki which provides yet another option for picking things up but can also function a bit like a straw not an all the way straw though it is a nose after all and you know what it feels like to get
a nose full of water all the way back so when it sucks it doesn't suck all the way it holds whatever is sucked and then it can squirt it back out into an appropriate orifice or whatever the wants really I know you like to learn you're here and learning about elephants aren't you well brilliant.org is an amazing free and easy way to learn about a whole lot more math data science computer science it feels good to learn and it helps a lot when a five-year-old keeps asking why or your boss for that matter billion has
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visit brilliant.org zayfrank or click on the link in the description the first 200 of you will get 20 off brilliant's annual premium subscription brilliant has been a long time sponsor of this show because I like what they do check them out today where were we oh right elephants eat sticks and leaves and other crap a sensible person might rake up and throw in the green bin for pickup now if you've tried you'd know that it's not all that easy to eat those things imagine if the toothpick was the appetizer but they have some good equipment
African elephants and male Asian elephants have tusks which are their incisors female Asian elephants will often have little tiny incisors sticking out called tushes it's called a tush tusks and tushes don't help with the chewing but they can scrape some bark off now and then the business end of the mouth is in the back elephants have some big ass molars back there about the size of a brick this is one even though it looks like several they chew all that Woody crap front to back not side to side like we do and those teeth wear
down luckily they have six sets throughout their lifetime when a new molar comes in it doesn't come from below it comes from behind the old worn down tooth is pushed forward and then it breaks off in segments while the roots are reabsorbed once the last set of teeth comes in that's it those eventually wear down and if the elephant lives long enough it'll die makes sense doesn't it anyway they chew everything up into a pulp and then that pulp gets fermented inside of their body that creates gas told you but the whole process only extracts
about 20 percent of what went in the other side the resulting dung still has some nutritional value it's a pre-digested morsel for whoever wants another go at it and many do including other elephants ones that don't have the patience to wait for it to drop so they get after it so to speak I mean we blurt it but imagine a snake trying to escape into an elephant's butt Jerry you only did half the analogy that doesn't help the snake has to go into something different like no not at different animals but Jerry you're really not
getting it butt trunks are sorry but trunks are also used to communicate they can be noisy little bastards and make all sorts of sounds there's the classic trumpeting sound which sounds a bit more like a lion trapped in a tuba they can drop that down low and it sounds like a giant horse that's not impressed by pinching the front end together they can go up high sounds like demons likely because they're making two pictures at once one from each nostril and if they pinch it real hard it can sound like the squeak part of a
birthday balloon now if they squeeze further back and inflate the trunk near the head they can make a sound like a coffee machine that just ran out of water there's this sound which is very impolite we won't speak of it again sometimes they push air into the sinus cavities in front of their face and make these strange inside throbbing sounds foreign at least one elephant has figured out that if it modifies the shape of its mouth while making sounds with its trunk it can mimic the vowel sounds of human words this one's saying chowa or
good in Korean not bad is it now all of this is well and good if you live in groups like females do but if you're a male you might be alone in miles away from other elephants for that they got a whole nother system and it starts with their feet elephants stand tibito with the back of the foot supported by a high heel of fat their toe area and their heel area have nerves in them that are particularly sensitive to touch both of these features help the elephant feel and listen to vibrations in the ground
look this one's listening to see if something's afoot with his foot by stomping their feet or making low rumbles elephants can create seismic waves that travel for Miles through the ground which is apparently louder than a man having a tantrum when they reach another elephant those waves travel up through the fatten through the bones of the oven up to its years the bones inside of the elephants here are especially large entuned for these low frequency vibrations in this way elephants can not only hear other elephants miles away but they can figure out the direction too
sometimes a group of elephants will even arrange themselves like a compass to better figure out where the sound is coming from pretty smart right well elephants are smart at least according to them they're also narcissists elephants have some big brains look at that one it's dead they have roughly three times the neurons of a human brain but they only have a third of the neurons that we have in the thinky-thinky parts but you get what you get and they do seem to know how to use what they have I mean look at this they can
move objects and use them to reach high up food if you put one in front of a mirror it gets all into it but the science hippies wanted to test if the elephant knew that it was looking at itself so they painted an x on its face and look at that the elephant touched it it knows what's up and it was totally checking itself out in the mirror they seem to be aware of their own bodies if you ask them to give you a handle that's attached to a map that they're standing on they understand
that they have to move off of it first when they can do teamwork too you give them a two pulley situation where you can't go it alone and they wait for another elephant to help out here's a variation on that with his still two pulleys but just one basket of food look at that the big one takes it home for himself what a dick at this point you're just with elephants one of the areas where elephants have a lot more neurons than humans is in the part of the brain that deals with smelling they're very
good at it and they can remember smells for a very long time here's an elephant casually walking by a pile of crap from an elephant she doesn't know gives it a sniff as is the custom and moves on now here's the same basic setup but the turret is from her daughter who she hasn't seen in 12 years now when she takes that whiff she gets all excited goes back to check it out ears flapping it's like recognizing the perfume of your first crush I mean if they worship you can do this experiment by the way
and you don't need 12 years just go to Grandma's take a living room and hide in the closet you know she loves you if she's happy to find it anyway the daughter and mother were reunited by the way be pretty messed up if they didn't do that now starting at around 20 or 30 years male elephants will sometimes go into something called must their hormones go crazy and they get all horny and aggressive sort of like intense puberty but it gets very leaky like they're peeing for example normally elephants pee like this very straightforward to
the point being but in must they often don't drop their penis all the way and it comes out in a dribble and look at that he's slapping it with his tail it all helps to spread the scent of this sexy time urine and if that wasn't enough they started leaking out of these temporal glands on the side of their head that stuff stinks too and he wafted around by flapping their ears these smells actually have information about how fit and strong the male elephant is now females might use this to judge the quality of a
potential mate but other males use it to figure out who's most likely stronger and would win in a fight that way you can ideally avoid the fight altogether one issue here is that females are Jerry why is this one kicking his penis is it part of must what if it's not don't show it it'll give people ideas well it could become one of those Tick-Tock challenges and then everyone's kicking their dicks Jerry you want that alright let's move on one issue here is that females are only down for it in short windows of time and
males and females don't live in the same herds so it's always a booty call literally both females and males have a hookup Rumble that can travel from Isles here you can see science hippies playing a female estrus call and a confused male trying to figure out where it's coming from apparently that's what you do with a PhD catfish an elephant now when they do find each other it's all over fairly quickly a lot of build up and stinky urine for about 45 seconds of pain off and it's a bit of a clumsy Affair not really
built for the Kama Sutra but it is cute that the male rests his trunk on the female and sometimes like in this shot if the female is inexperienced or the male is particularly large other females will gather around to give a bit of support and comfort it's very sweet you can do it Ethel you're doing great and soon enough a new little elephant baby will be born what Jerry how would they do it Oh you mean the kick your own dip challenge you don't even ask questions like that I'm telling you the young kids are
so impressionable that you get you know Irish dancing that's what it would look like Jerry you know that's sort of the hacky sack kick they do I mean if you practice that I'm sure you could kick your own dick no Jerry that's cheating you can't have somebody else kick your dick that's not even the same Challenge and I bet they already did it oh that's a good question Jerry can you be lying down while you do it like you're in a sit-up pose and you use your heel see that's interesting because it's exercise forget hit
classes Jerry these days it's all kick your dick [Music] thank you [Music]
