Pang Pha, the Asian elephant, taught herself how to peel a banana

An elephant's prehensile trunk is a marvel of biology, featuring as many as 60,000 muscles that enable the animal to not just breathe, eat, and drink water, but also to communicate and pinch or grasp objects, among other abilities. Some elephants have been known to make rudimentary tools with their trunks to scratch themselves, repel insects, or even block roads. And one Asian elephant, named Pang Pha, in the Berlin Zoo learned how to peel a banana, according to a new paper published in the journal Current Biology—a highly unusual ability for a pachyderm, and one the other Asian elephants in the Berlin Zoo don't possess.

“We discovered a very unique behavior,” said co-author Michael Brecht of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin’s Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience. “What makes Pang Pha's banana peeling so unique is a combination of factors—skillfulness, speed, individuality, and the putatively human origin—rather than a single behavioral element.”

Brecht and his co-authors first heard about Pang Pha's unusual ability from her zoo caretakers and decided to conduct a series of experiments, presenting the elephant with about 10 bananas each round and filming her behavior. The first experiments involved Pang Pha alone, and while she repeatedly raised her trunk—typical begging behavior for elephants—when approached with bananas, for the first few weeks, the elephant didn't peel any of them. Eventually the scientists realized that whether or not Pang Phase peeled a banana depended on its ripeness. She preferred to devour green or yellow bananas whole and rejected brown bananas entirely.