GETTING an elephant to swallow a large metal pill is no easy task. "They are very intelligent animals and will check the food you prepare for them," says Nicole Weissenböck.
Even hiding the 3-centimetre-long capsules in bananas – an elephant favourite – doesn't work. "If they bite on them, they don't even crush them, they spit them back out," Weissenböck says. Instead, she discovered, the trick is to wait until their mouths are open and then chuck the pills down their throats along with some tasty treats.
The metal pills contain not medicine but temperature sensors and radio transmitters. For big animals, staying cool is a challenge – and yet elephants, the largest land animals in the world, live in some of the hottest places. So how do they survive the heat? Weissenböck and others have decided to find out, and they've discovered that elephants have evolved some surprisingly sophisticated ...
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