A new sort of senior moment has been arriving over the past few weeks, a senior moment which seems to affect the timing of my fingers when I type.
I used to be a roughly four finger typist who did not generally look at the keyboard. Of late, I have been finding that the letters are arriving on the page in the wrong order. The bit of the brain, possibly the rather large chunk of the brain, responsible for turning words into firing commands for the muscles of the fingers seems to have lost its grip. The good news is that if I make an effort to slow down, things seem to get better.
From there, the brain, for some reason and along some chain of association which I now forget, wandered off to the trunks of elephants, which I now know to be unusual in that they are a large prehensile organ without skeletal support. Perhaps not the largest as octopuses and squids also have such things and squids can come quite big too. The tongue is another, rather smaller but rather complicated example.
A quick poke around the net, and I find that the trunk might have as many as 40,000 muscles - with the catch being that I am not very clear what a muscle might be in this context, with there being 150,000 of something else and talk somewhere else again of 8 major muscles. A skeletal muscle seems to be a well defined entity with a start point at one bone attachment and and end point at another, with less than 1,000 of them in the average human body. Not so clear what goes on in a trunk where there are no points of attachment of that sort, although it does seem that there is a mixture, with some muscles going up and down the trunk, some being arranged radially and some spirally, it being these last which gives the trunk its considerable strength on the twist. Another angle was that these muscles could be considered to be packets which did not change their volume but which did change their shape, perhaps from short and fat to long and thin. Join enough such packets together and you have a working trunk. That being as it may be and assuming that it is some large number, the point of interest here is that the elephant brain has to organise the coordinated firing of 40,000 muscles, it has to translate the thought (in elephantese) 'pick up the peanut' into a very large number of firing commands. Perhaps older elephants lose their touch in these matters.
Sadly, I failed to get a proper story about all this as all the proper stories were lurking behind paywalls and I was not sufficiently interested in trunks to stump up the $30 a pop asked for papers which might easily turn out to be unhelpful.
But I did learn that elephants have a very good sense of smell, much stronger than that, for example, of bloodhounds. At which point one has the splendid vision of po-faced officers from the drugs squad leading their sniffer elephants around some drug lord's pad in some tower block in some dodgy part of London. How many can they get in the lift at once? Who gets to clear up any mess? Another story was that male elephants could smell water - or females - at fifty miles, which I found a bit odd. Just about plausible that water molecules could diffuse through the air that sort of distance and remain detectable from the background noise, but what about direction? Is the elephant nose - not actually in the trunk as it happens - so sensitive that it can detect a gradient in a smell from fifty miles away in fifty centimetres? I think I suspend judgement on that one.
Closing factlet, the olefactory bulbs, the business bits of vertebrate noses, come in pairs, like eyes. Why was evolution so keen on pairs? Is it all down to direction finding?
On which note, back to bed to dream of elephants snuffling out their straying wives from miles & miles across the jungle wastes.
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