How elephants' hair style helps them stay cool

Joanna Carver, reporter

(Image: Conor Myhrvold/Princeton University)

This may sound shocking, but elephants don't care much about style. Their hair, a Princeton University study has found, is functional, meant to keep the heat away.

It may seem like a bizarre concept, since in many animals hair or fur is meant to trap heat and keep critters warm. "But in this paper," said Elie Bou-Zeid, who led the research team, "we show that the sparse hair has the opposite effect."

An elephant's hairs help heat travel away from the skin. According to the study, a light breeze is enough to significantly cool an elephant, increasing its heat loss by 20 per cent.

Elephants, big leathery animals that they are, need to know how to cool off. They also use their trunks to splash water and mud on themselves.

Conor Myhrvold, a recent Princeton graduate and the paper's lead author, pointed out that nearly 300 years ago, scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek studied elephant hairs with one of the microscopes he invented and wrote to the Royal Society about them.

"It's not too surprising that something so small could be forgotten on something so large, the world's largest land animal," he said.

Journal reference: PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0047018

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/24c0cb23/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cshortsharpscience0C20A120C10A0Celephant0Ehair0Estyle0Bhtml0Dcmpid0FRSS0QNSNS0Q20A120EGLOBAL0Qonline0Enews/story01.htm

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