EVERY elephant has about 1,000 whiskers on its trunk.
They play a crucial role for the animals, which have thick skin and poor eyesight.
Elephants cannot regrow these hairs, meaning a lost one creates a permanent sensory blind spot on a trunk, which they use for almost everything in daily life.
And as such an important feature, they are also unique among mammalian facial hairs.
“Elephant whiskers are aliens,” said Andrew Schulz, a mechanical engineer at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany.
In a study published recently in the journal Science, Schulz and his colleagues identified the structural features that give elephant whiskers a kind of “built-in” intelligence, providing the sensitivity that the largest mammals on land need to navigate their world.
While other animals like rats can move their whiskers around, a behaviour known as “whisking”, elephants lack the necessary muscles.
That leaves their whiskers essentially stationary, even if they protrude from the flexible trunk.
This puzzled Schulz, who had previously studied the movement of their trunks.
“If elephant trunk whiskers can’t move, there’s probably something built into them that allows them to function in a way similar to mammals that whisk,” Schulz said.
To find out, Schulz gathered scientists from many fields.
Engineers, neuroscientists, biologists and material scientists were among the few who studied whiskers in baby and adult Asian elephants. (All elephant whiskers came from animals that had died naturally and were donated by a zoo veterinarian; “We did not go up and pluck whiskers from elephants,” Schulz said.)
Previous research on whiskers typically clamped both ends and examined the middle.
Instead, the team studied changes along the entire length of each whisker, using electron microscopy, computer modelling and other techniques.
After the scientists had gathered data about geometry, stiffness and porosity, elephant whiskers looked unlike any other animal’s.
Geometrically, Schulz likened them to blades of grass. They are flat and have square-like sides at the base.
Stiffness tests showed that whiskers gradually transition from thick, stiff roots to soft tips.
Internally, their porosity was characterised by a network of holes. The tiny holes help the whiskers absorb impact, Schulz said, preventing damage across a lifetime of use.
“I didn’t know hairs could look like Swiss cheese before,” said David Hu, a biomechanical engineer at Georgia Tech who was not involved in the study. “Growing something with holes is pretty fascinating.”
Together, these three qualities allow each whisker to detect where along its length an object makes contact, achieved without any ratlike whisking.
Such sensitivity may give elephants an advantage for manipulation. Without the need for whisking, elephant whiskers have a kind of intelligence that is almost innate.
Because the findings so surprised the scientists, they 3D printed an enlarged replica of a whisker – what Schulz called a “whisker wand” – and tried to experience some of what an elephant perceives through its trunk hairs.
When closing their eyes and tapping the wand against objects, they found that each contact point felt different.
Going from a stiff base to a soft tip might amplify the signal connected to the firing of sensory neurones, possibly helping the animal perceive the location of contact along each whisker. This would help elephants navigate despite limitations to their senses.
The study also found that when compared with other animals’ whiskers, elephants have more in common with a cat than a rat.
But while cats and elephants both have whiskers with a stiff base and a soft tip, the shape and internal structure of cat whiskers are different from elephants’.
The team “showed that really elegantly”, said John Hutchinson, an evolutionary biomechanist at the Royal Veterinary College who wasn’t involved with the research. “That impressed me,” he said. “I just always thought, ‘Whiskers – well, they’re just whiskers.’”
In the past, elephant research focused on the animals’ ecology and behaviour. More recently, scientists have turned to new technologies to understand their remarkable specialisations, Hutchinson said.
“They’re very extreme animals,” he added. “And even as large mammals, they’re really weird in many ways. They offer a lot of interesting extremes to look at.” — ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times
