On why elephant nervous systems give blood-suckers a chance (& it takes me longer than Amp to realise we're standing in an ant nest)
Elephants have weird skin: not (at least for the purposes of this piece) in the odd to look at, wrinkly & noduled sense, that's kind of cool (literally, as it happens, as a lot of it has to do with heat regulation) but more in the way they feel things.
Just watch the babies at play with their one tonne, full impact, sports; the hits they put in and receive would not only crush us beyond recognition, but would leave severe bruising all over - I write this with a bruised toe (well, to be accurate, I write with my hands, but I have a bruised toe as I write) from little 'Phil-the-eight-week-old's latest stomping mission.
Watch, if you will, Nam Chok & Pumpui in the river, 'Pui will be clambering all over her older sister, perhaps not yet a tonne but at least 500 kg with solid toe nails standing on top of you - that's got to hurt - but no reaction at all from Chok who appears to enjoy the affection; with the babies "hold your friend's head underwater by standing on it" seems to be a favourite game, it does no damage because elephant skin, as we're describing, is tough as old shoe leather and all fellow elephants have a built in snorkel (one reason we don't go in with the babies (& especially the younger ones) so often is that I consider myself a friend & I'm not sure they've really worked out that I don't have a snorkel).
So there you have it, elephant skin, like an old pair of Scarpas except thicker, the original Pachy Derm and dull as dishwater, can't feel a thing through the leather. Right?
Wrong. Just watch an ele when a fly lands or even crawls across its skin, there's something lighter than a feather and yet the tail swishes, the trunk blows or a trunkful of leaves swat away.
An elephant's skin, thick as it is in places & thin as it is in others, seems to react to different sensations differently and to this we shouldn't be surprised, after all, we're the same: we can carry a back-pack or a child for some time, let them clamber all over us, the foolish amongst us can play impact sports (though we usually bruise quite badly) but an insect as light as ant (& elephants except 'Phil, who does a little dance, aren't generally bothered by ants so there is a concept of scale at play here) crawling across our skin we're irritated, a grass seed head brushed against our ear by a prankster & we jump.
Evolutionarily this makes sense, we wouldn't have got far as a species if we were so sensitive to pain that we couldn't handle the odd impact but equally, we'd have been in trouble if we didn't notice the potentially disease, sting or allergy carrying insect when it landed on our back.
Two things got me started on this train of thought, the first was a guest question, more of a complaint really (see, I do listen), along the lines of "The day was a great experience... ...my elephant was naughty, I know, but I didn't like the way the mahout kept slapping her with his flip-flop" and the second was a piece in the New York Times with the, as it turns out, erroneous title "Big Animals, Slower Reflexes" about a paper with the unfathomably scientific title of "Scaling of sensorimotor control in terrestrial mammals" by Heather L. More et. al.
Rather than quote the paper at my poor bewildered guest I gave the simple answer: this is the time of year of very big, bloodsucking, elephant flies - not entirely sure of the genus or the real common name - but think a horse fly scaled up & designed to get through the skin of an elephant or a rhino (in Nepal I've seen them have a go, albeit without much luck, at the tyres on the bonnet of the Land Rovers).
So, when you see a mahout remove his shoe & slap his elephant (at least in my happy little camp) he's not doing it to punish his elephant for being naughty as a father would a child - in the old days when I were a lad - he's actually doing his elephant a favour (again, at least in my happy little camp I like to think that most actions were for the benefit of the elephants) in squashing a nasty, large beastie & believe me you need a shoe or a stick, the hand doesn't always cut it & when these things are full & explode, well, it can be quite messy.
That the elephant doesn't feel or react to the impact of a flying slipper is again indicative of their funny skin perhaps?
The other question would be, with all this anti-fly defence system of trunk, tail & branches why hasn't the elephant moved the fly on itself? ...and this is the question the paper goes some way toward answering. Though it may seem like common sense, as we've discussed before, for the purposes of the scientific world, unless you prove an anecdote it remains anecdotal & therefore a fireside story rather than a fact: our intrepid scientists have proven that if you tickle the back leg of a shrew and of an elephant it takes longer for the elephant to notice than it does the shrew, this, they posit, is because the nervous message has further to travel to get to the brain.
So, due to the size of the beast, an elephant fly has some spare time to settle into its meal before the message that it has landed gets to the brain and the brain decides what to do about it - there must be other factors such as the sheer amount of sensation the elephant's brain has to process due to the vast skin and the relative vulnerability to predators - it is not very often an elephant has to flee a pouncing Tiddles etc. (and, contrary to the NYT's assertion, I like to think they're probably studying some philosophy also).
But this nicely answers the question as to why the mahouts are sometimes called upon to be their elephant's pest removal system.
On the other hand if the elephant fly lands on the shrew it would probably crush it but at least the shrew's brain would have sent the message back.
But does this finally give me an excuse for my slow reflexes? Well, thinking about it, no - even if I were two feet taller than Amp, when we walk into an ant nest it would, according to this study, take longer for the message to reach my brain but as these messages travel at 180 feet per second (197 kph or 122 mph) my extra (moving into metric units to avoid podiatricle confusion) 60.96cm would buy the stingers on my two feet 0.01111r seconds.
So all the scientists have managed to prove for me is that 1.9888 of the 2 seconds longer it takes me to realise I'm in an ant nest than it does Amp is due my brain not functioning as quickly as hers (something to do with age, I'm sure), plain and simple.
Darn you, scientists, darn you.
PS. The reason I think (& I'm ready to be corrected) the title Big Animals, Slow Reflexes is erroneous is that, as I understand it, a reflex is an action handled by the nervous system itself & not by the brain and therefore isn't dependent on distance from the brain.
Posted by John Roberts at Thu, 12 Aug 2010 10:09:00 GMT 
Categories: General Conservation, Public Service Broadcast
Categories: General Conservation, Public Service Broadcast
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