Why Do Elephants Have Trunks? Why Do Giraffes Have Purple Tongues?
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This is But Why, a podcast for curious kids from Vermont Public Radio. I'm Jane Lindholm. On this podcast, we take questions from kids just like you all over the world, and it's our job to find answers. In this episode, we're getting a close-up look at two different animals. One has a long neck, and the other has a long trunk. ♪

That sound you're hearing is an elephant. That's its trumpeting call. Elephants make that noise by pushing air through their long trunk. And it's loud. But did you know that elephants can make low-frequency rumbling noises that are too low for humans to hear? But elephants can hear them from miles away.

Elephants make a lot of different kinds of noises, from trumpets and rumbles to chirps and growls. But you had other questions for us about elephants, so we put them to a man named Peter Regg. He works with the Elephant Listening Project. That's a group based at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in New York State. These researchers are looking into all those sounds I was just talking about by studying African elephants.

But Peter knows a lot of other things about elephants, too. So let's have him tackle some of your questions. My name is Maggie. I'm five years old. I'm from Mesa, Arizona. My question is, why are elephants huge? Hi, my name is Jonah. I live in Nino, Massachusetts.

I'm five years old. My question is, why are elephants so big? That's a really great question. And believe it or not, scientists are not really sure that they know the answer. To start, let's ask why being really big is an advantage. If you're big, it's harder for many predators to eat you. Elephants are so big that there are almost no other animals big enough to kill and eat them. Only humans are a real threat to an adult elephant.

Also, if you're a mammal like me and you and elephants, we keep warm by burning food energy from the inside. It's easier to keep a big body warm. And if you're big, you can store more energy inside as fat or muscle to get you through a time when there's a shortage of food.

So if being big is an advantage, why aren't all mammals as big as elephants? Scientists think how big animals get depends a lot on what sorts of challenges the animal is facing as they try to get big. Things like how much food is around and what kinds of predators are they trying to avoid. The earliest relatives of elephants were only the size of a fox. If there was lots of food around and not many predators, these early elephants might have been able to get bigger.

Also, at some point very long ago, elephants faced a climate that was getting cold, so there was an advantage to be big so you could keep warm.

And bigger elephants did better than smaller elephants. And so if those bigger elephants were better at surviving, they were also more likely to reproduce or make babies. And so their babies, their offspring, were more likely to be big like their parents. And the big offspring were more likely to reproduce and their children would be bigger. And then their children were more likely to be bigger and so on and so on until they reached a point at which it wasn't actually better to be any bigger.

That process, where the characteristics of an animal change over time based on the strongest survival traits, is called natural selection. Now, if you've ever seen an elephant up close, or maybe even been able to touch one, you might have noticed something about the elephant's skin. Its skin is pretty dry and wrinkly.

Hi, my name is Max. I live in Oregon. I'm seven years old. My question is, why are elephants' skin rough? We think that the skins of elephants look the way they do now because millions of years ago, the climate began to get warmer and the places that elephants were living got hot and dry.

Some of the closest ancestors of today's elephants were the mastodons and the woolly mammoths of the Ice Age. And these elephants were really hairy, more like most mammals. This was good in a cold environment because it helped to keep them warm. But if the temperatures get really hot, a big body is hard to cool off. Elephants lost most of the hair that they once had because this helped them to keep cooler in a warming environment.

But hair also helps protect the skin from damage. So when elephants lost most of their hair so that they could keep cool, they needed to find another way to protect their skin. Their solution was thick and rough skin that protected them from rubbing against bushes and sticks and trees. Elephant skin also looks really rough because it has lots of tiny, tiny folds and channels running all over it. And this also turns out to be really good for keeping cool.

You and I keep cool on hot days by sweating, getting moisture on our skins that evaporates and cools the skin. Elephants don't have sweat glands in their skin, so they can't sweat. But the little channels in their skin can hold a lot of water, and nice cool mud sticks to their crinkly skin better. Elephants love to spray themselves with water and mud, which helps them to stay cool. And you probably know what part of their body they use to spray themselves with that water and mud.

That's right, they're trunks. My name's Elizabeth and I'm five years old. I live in Fayetteville, Arkansas. My question is, how do animals with trunks drink water? My name is Amelia and I live in Virginia. I'm five years old and my question is, how do elephants suck up the water then spray it? Elephants drink water with the help of their trunks, a little bit like you would suck up milk through a straw.

They contract muscles in their trunk just enough to fill the trunk maybe a quarter full. Then they pull their trunk out of the water and put the end in their mouth. They let the water spill out into their mouth to drink it. They don't actually suck water all the way up their trunk to drink because then they would choke on it. A trunk is really kind of a fancy nose. You don't like water getting up your nose, do you? Well, neither do elephants.

When they use their trunk to spray water on themselves, they do the same thing to get water into their trunk, but then blow it back out the end like a fire hose. But wait, what exactly is a trunk anyway? My name is Maya. I'm five years old. I live in San Carlos, California, and what I want to know is why do elephants have a trunk? My name is Micah, and I'm six years old.

And I live in Burlington, Vermont. My question is, why do elephants have trunks? Hi, my name is Deba, and I'm seven years old. Why do elephants have long trunks? My name is Christopher. I'm five and a half, and I live in Lyme, New Hampshire. And I want to know, why do elephants have trunks?

Elephant trunks are one of the most amazing things anywhere. As you know, the trunk of an elephant is a really, really long nose, but a whole lot more useful than ours is. Elephant trunks have more than 40,000 muscles.

which lets an elephant do almost anything with that trunk. By comparison, you have about 700 muscles in your whole body. Your nose has just four muscle groups that help it function. But did you know that early elephant ancestors didn't have a trunk at all? Scientists can only guess about why getting a long trunk helped early elephants to survive better. We know that the early elephants did have tusks.

And one idea is that as tusks got longer, it got harder and harder for elephants to get their mouths to the ground to eat the grass. The trunk helped them to reach more food. It also lets elephants eat a lot more food in a shorter time. While they're chewing up a mouthful of grass or leaves, they're using the trunk to gather the next bite. No wasted time.

So again, the elephants with the longer trunks did better than those with the shorter trunks, and over millions of years, we got an elephant with a long trunk. But once the elephant's nose started to become a trunk, with all those muscles, it became a very valuable tool for survival. Modern elephants use their trunks for thousands of tasks, and they can reach nearly every part of their body with that trunk. So they can keep their skin in really good shape.

It helps them reach high up into the branches of trees to find food, and it can help a newborn baby to stand up or to get out of a hole that it falls into. From trunks, let's go to another amazing part of the elephant anatomy, its feet. My name is Brendan. I'm from Summonville, Virginia. I'm four. Why do elephants stomp? Why elephants stomp is a fun question because, in fact, they almost never do.

This is probably an impression that comes from them being so big and maybe from the cartoons. Okay, so if they don't stop, how do they walk? Elephants, in fact, walk very, very quietly because they're careful where they put their feet. Think of how careful you are in the early summer when you first go outside in your bare feet. Those little sticks and pebbles kind of hurt. Now think of an elephant putting three tons of weight on their feet. Ouch!

But when they're scared and they stampede, elephants do make a lot of noise as they run and their feet are pounding on the ground. Elephants do a lot of things in cartoons that may or may not be scientifically correct. So let's set the record straight. Hi, my name is Lucas. I'm six years old and from Kennetha, Georgia. And my question is, why are elephants afraid of mice?

My name is Karina. I'm five years old. I live in Westwood, California, and I want to know why is elephants scared of mice? Elephants? Afraid of mice? Only in the cartoons. Elephants aren't afraid of very much, except humans. And with good reason. Coming up, we'll learn about the threats those elephants face in the world today. And we'll answer your questions about another very large animal, the giraffe. Do giraffes have long necks?

Why do giraffes have purple tongues? This is But Why, a podcast for curious kids. I'm Jane Lindholm, and right now we're answering your questions all about elephants. We're doing that with Peter Regg. He's the director of the Elephant Listening Project, which studies the way elephants communicate and then uses that information to monitor elephant populations.

He gave us this sound from the Zangabai, the village of the elephants in Central African Republic. The Elephant Listening Project has been observing elephants there for more than 20 years. So Peter knows a lot about elephants, and he's answering your questions about these large and interesting mammals. My name is Kevin.

And I am five and a half, and I live in Sammamish, Washington, and my question is, why do elephants have tusks? Elephants use their tusks for lots of important things. The forest elephants that I study use them to remove strips of bark from tree trunks to eat, but mostly they're used by males to show how big and tough they are, and to fight with other males.

Both males and females have tusks in the two species of African elephant, but female Asian elephants don't have tusks, and only some of the males do. While those tusks have some advantages, having tusks also has a very big disadvantage in the modern world. Here's Evie. Hi, I'm Evie, and I'm eight years old, and... Why are elephants being poached?

Do you know what poaching is? In this context, poaching is when someone takes an animal that they're not supposed to. So when Evie asks why elephants are being poached, she means why are elephants being killed by people? This is such an important question. Elephants are being poached because their ivory tusks are valuable for carving. Ivory is a very beautiful material, and it's been used for thousands of years to make beautiful things.

Even in the U.S., we used to make keys for pianos and pool balls out of ivory. The biggest reason elephants are poached today is because in some cultures, ivory is a traditional object that shows the wealth of a family. It's really a status symbol. What many people still don't realize is that the elephant needs to be killed to take their ivory. Tusks don't fall out like teeth, and they never grow back if they're broken.

And so, unfortunately, many elephants are killed by poachers for their tusks. Elephants are protected, but so far that hasn't stopped poachers, because ivory is really valuable. Elephants live in Asia and Africa, and if you care about them, you can talk to the adults in your life about supporting elephant conservation. Thanks so much to Peter Regg from the Elephant Listening Project. Now we're going to talk about an animal that doesn't really make much sound at all, the giraffe. We're going to get some help from this person.

Hi, my name is Steph Fennessy and I'm director of the Giraffe Conservation Foundation, or GCF. GCF is the only organization in the world that concentrates solely on the conservation and management of giraffe in the wild throughout Africa. Our first two questions are about one of the most distinctive features of the giraffe. I'm four and my name is William. Why are giraffes so tall? Why are giraffes so tall? My name is Silas. I live in...

I'm from Rockville, Maryland. My question is, why do giraffes have a really long neck? People often wonder about the long neck of giraffes.

It is probably that they can reach food high up where no other animals can reach. But it also didn't evolve quickly. It has evolved over thousands and thousands of years and gotten longer. Just like the elephants with their trunks. Remember how we talked about natural selection and how bigger elephants with longer trunks, longer noses, were better at reproducing? So over time, they grew longer trunks and got bigger and bigger.

Same thing with giraffes for their necks. The giraffes that could reach food up high in the tree branches did better because there was less competition up there. And so millions of years later, we have long-necked giraffes. But there's another advantage, too. It also gives male giraffe, giraffe bulls, an advantage when they're fighting. Whoa! Can you imagine giraffes fighting with their necks? It's pretty wild to see. The male giraffes smack each other hard with their long necks when they fight.

It may look a little silly to us, but it helps the males determine who is dominant. I'm Connor. I'm seven years old. I live in Converse, Texas. My question is, why do animals have different patterns like beavers, giraffes, cheetahs, and other types of animals?

Just with most other animals, the pattern of a giraffe helps the giraffe to blend into the environment. It's a little bit of a disguise so that predators don't spot them so easily. So they really blend in. It's a camouflage. But another really cool fact about giraffe pattern is that each giraffe has an individual pattern. It's just like your fingerprint.

So if you see a giraffe, you can actually identify it. And we are taking photos of all giraffes in Africa, put them into a database, and then when we see the giraffe, we can actually find out if we have seen it before. Hi, my name is Maya. I'm six years old. I live in Florida. And my question is, why do giraffes have purple tongues? That is a great question, Maya.

A giraffe tongue looks pretty cool. It's purple, black and really long, 50 centimeters, 20 inches long. And if you watch them feeding, they wrap the tongue around branches to drag off the leaves. So most people think that the tongue is purple or very dark black to protect it from the sun, just like you use sunscreen to protect your skin from the sun.

Another really fun fact about giraffe tongues is that their saliva is antiseptic. So if they injure their tongue when feeding on the long thorns of the acacia trees, they actually don't get infected. My name's Alex and I'm 10 from Essex, Vermont. What's a giraffe's usual lifespan?

Yeah, Alexa, it seems like such an easy and simple question, but unfortunately we don't really know. We know that giraffe in zoos live for about 25 years, but we have no idea how old giraffe get in the wild because there's just no one who has watched giraffe. So there's been done very little research about them. And we think they probably reach the same age in the wild as in the zoo, but we don't really definitely know.

If you like learning about giraffes, Steph wants you to know something. One thing that most people don't know is that giraffe are in trouble. There is less than 100,000 giraffe remaining in Africa and their numbers are dropping. So it's really important that we make sure that they are safe and that you can still see giraffe in Africa in the wild when you grow up.

So if you want to support animals like giraffes and like elephants, you can support conservation groups like the ones we talked with today. They work hard to make sure these animals can survive. Thanks to Steph Fennessy, director of the Giraffe Conservation Foundation based in Namibia. And that's it for today. Now, if you have a question about anything, have an adult record it and send it to questions at butwhykids.org. It's easy to do if you have a smartphone.

We can't answer every question you've sent us. We really wish we could. But we do listen to them all, and we are so delighted to hear about what's been on your mind. By the way, But Why has an email list. It's for adults, and you can get your adults to sign up at butwhykids.org. We send them notes to let them know about our new episodes and to give more information about our guests. So if you're not on it, go to butwhykids.org to sign up.

But Why is produced by Melody Beaudet and me, Jane Lindholm, at Vermont Public Radio. Our theme music is by Luke Reynolds. We'll be back in two weeks with an all-new episode. Until then, stay curious.