Food can be a great motivator. That’s true whether you’re a kid with a sweet tooth or an elephant with a taste for fresh fruit. And just like people, animals often get quite creative when they’re in the mood for a meal or treat. Crows will turn sticks into tools to reach bugs. Chimpanzees will use stones as hammers to crack open nuts. Archerfish will shoot jets of spit to knock an insect off a leaf. Now a video shows Asian elephants using cleverly aimed puffs of air to move apples, leaves and other food close enough to grab and eat.
Kaori Mizuno and colleagues at the Graduate University for Advanced Studies in Hayama, Japan, caught the behavior on video. They worked with two female Asian elephants, Mineko and Suzuko. Both elephants lived at the Kamine Zoo. It’s in Japan’s Ibaraki Prefecture. In 2011, Mizuno had observed Mineko blowing with her trunk to obtain food. She and her colleagues decided to look more closely at the behavior.
The two elephants live in an enclosure that is surrounded by a U-shaped ditch that the animals cannot enter or cross. The ditch is just shallow enough that an elephant can reach an object on the bottom with its trunk. But it can’t reach an object on the far side of this moat. This let Mizuno’s team set up a challenge for the animals. They regularly set out tasty treats — apples, bamboo, hay, potatoes or fallen leaves — on the far side of the ditch. They then recorded what the elephants did.
