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Calling someone an elephant is now a compliment.
In case you thought people weren’t chunky enough, a US study found that even elephants in captivity pack less fat than the average human.
“Obesity is not clearly defined in humans, let alone elephants,” said Indiana University’s Daniella Chusyd, who conducted the species-defying study published in the Journal of Experimental Biology. She discovered this surprising discrepancy in fat levels while conducting research on obesity in captive elephants. Scientists had long been concerned that extra pounds were to blame for the fact that captive elephants experienced lower birth rates, shorter life spans and other health problems compared with their wild counterparts, Science Alert reported.
“I was interested in discovering whether methods predominantly used in human health research could help us learn more about elephants,” said Chusyd. Up to this point, no one had measured the fat levels in Asian elephants, according to Phys.org.
To determine the ratio of blubber in the tuskers, the researcher and her team strapped jumbo-sized fitness monitors to the ankles of 35 female Asian elephants and nine male Asian elephants from nine zoos across the US and Canada.
“I quickly became their best friend,” she joked about the corpulence-calculating procedure.
Chusyd then fed her plus-sized patients bread soaked in “heavy water,” a special substance that helped them calculate the elephant’s water weight, which they tracked via regular blood samples taken 20 days before and after administering the bread. Subtracting the water weight from the overall body mass gave them an animal’s total fat levels, Phys.org reported.
They found that male elephants carried 8.5% body fat and females roughly 10%, markedly less than healthy human percentages, which range anywhere from 6% to 31%.
The findings also alleviated fears that elephants were notably less healthy in captivity. In addition to packing less junk in the trunk than suspected, the zoo pachyderms were also found to walk similar distances (between 0.03 and 2.8 km each hour) to their free range brethren, with the youngest animals walking the farthest.
In terms of fertility, the underweight animals were experiencing the lowest birth rates — and not the overweight ones as was previously believed.
Despite the promising results, the jury’s still out on whether Mrs. Jumbo is susceptible to obesity. Further analysis revealed that the fattest animals harbor the highest insulin levels, while Chusyd claims that “elephants could develop a diabetic-like state.”
The marbling-measuring method isn’t totally watertight. The authors wrote: “It must be emphasized that this is a new technique in elephants, the study involved a relatively small sample size, and there were no data on adiposity and mortality, so future work with larger sample sizes and greater ranges in body condition are needed.” Alas, we may not have answered the age-old question of how to tell if an elephant is fat.
However, in terms of care provided by zoos, Chusyd said: “They are doing a great job … they know their individual elephants best.”
Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for one California facility, which was sued for using banned prods on its animals.
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