(1) Their trunk is 7 feet long, weighs 392 pounds, and contains 100x more muscles than we have in our entire bodies. Not only can a trunk suck up 8 pints of water, it also functions as an arm, hand, snorkel, and a weapon. It is powerful enough to kill a lion with a single blow, yet the fingerlike lobes at the end can pick up a grain of rice.
(2) I learned a lot about elephant communication from this 60 Minutes segment, but I didn’t know this: Males and females can't understand each other's calls. And the female vocabulary is much larger.
Both come from The Book of Animal Ignorance, which, I’m not ashamed to say, has been the best book I’ve ever read on the pooper. It is 223 pages full of fascinating facts like this, with about 2 pages for each animal.
That second fact about males and females not being able to understand each other makes me really itchy. I tried, unsuccessfully, to learn more with a web search. Wikipedia says nothing about it, nor did any other site on the first page of Google search results (yeah, I’m lazy).
On the one hand, it makes me wonder why the eff evolution would have designed—or even allowed for—such a development. On the other hand, it makes me feel a little better that I don’t understand women at all.
The culture that is Washington, D.C.
5 hours ago
