This is scientific Americans 60 second science. I'm Karen Hopkins.

Elephants don't diet as far as we know, but their weight does fluctuate at least for the ones who live in a zoo.

Now, researchers have found that this gain and loss in an elephant's mass

appears to hinge on their jaws. More specifically, the unusual way these animals replace their teeth. The results appear in the

journal mammalian biology. Researchers at the University of Zorix clinic for zoo animals,

exotic pets and and wildlife,

we're exploring how an elephant's mass tracks with its overall physique,

whether the animal is jumbo-sized or spelt, for an elephant.

So, they gather data on the entire population of captive elephants throughout Europe.

The clinic's Marcus Klaus is a professor of comparative digestive physiology.

This was due to the commitment of a student I had at the time, who's called Christian Shiffman,

who is the driving force behind all this, because Christian visited basically every European

zoo that keeps elephants. He returned with records revealing the relative

heft of the resident packadirms.

At first glance, his observations were not so surprising.

As in Western societies, also in the zoo,

a lot of beings tend to be less in an ideal body condition and a little bit more on the

obese side and elephants are just the same in that respect.

But a deeper dive into the data turned up something curious. in that was

once the elephant, was that once the elephants reached what you would call

adult age and adult body mass,

there seemed to be something like a systematic cyclicity in the data,

...