One More Reason to Admire Elephant Trunks

The trunk of an African elephant is an evolutionary marvel. Clocking in at weights well over 200 pounds, it ripples with thousands of individual muscles that help the superlong schnoz lift barbells, uproot trees, and fling bothersome lions into the air.

A tortilla chip is an embarrassment of engineering. It weighs a fraction of an ounce and can measure less than a millimeter thick; it is so woefully fragile that the heft of a guinea pig or a generous scoop of guacamole could easily snap it in two.

And yet a union between chip and trunk is not as impossible as it might seem. Andrew Schulz, an engineer at Georgia Tech, and his colleagues have , reconciling the absurd imbalance between them, and described it in a published today. When offered a tortilla chip, they found, an elephant will use its trunk to deftly suctionthe salty treat into its grip. The chip stays intact (at least until it’s deposited into the elephant’s mouth); in the video, you can hear the researchers cheer.