Who is the animal with the biggest ears? | Israel today

In nature there are many and varied animals with large and long ears, among them the African elephant and the long-eared square • And why do animals need big ears?

• Does the elephant have the largest ears?

  Photo: 

  Tibor Jaeger

If we were to ask you which animal in the wild has the largest ears, you might easily answer that it is the African elephant - and you would be right.

African elephants have 1.2 meter long ears and are indeed the largest among animals.

But if we were a little difficult and asked you who has the biggest ears in nature in relation to his body size, you might already have a hard time answering and getting a little tangled up.

This is because the ears of the African elephant are only about 17 percent of its size, which reaches about seven and a half meters. 

The animal called the long-eared quadruped, which lives in the Gobi Desert in China and Mongolia, has ears that make up about 40 percent of its body.

The length of the entire square without the tail stands at ten inches while its ears are 5-3.8 inches long.

The long-eared square is a rare animal that operates on desert nights and feeds on small insects.

In fact, it is such a rare species that it was only in 2007 that scientists were able to take a video of it and view this animal.

And as for the obvious question why should the need for such large ears be quadrupled?

Here the answer is of course different from that of the wolf in the Little Red Riding Hood story, the square does not need the ears to hear well, but to get rid of its body heat.

In fact all the big-eared animals in the wild: the elephants, the pampered and also the square, use their ears to get rid of body heat.

The ears have very many capillaries, and when the animal is hot it spreads its ears and loses heat quickly, and when there is no need to lose heat, the ears contract.

This is also the reason why Asian elephants have smaller ears than African elephants.

The Asian elephant has ears only a tiny half a meter long, because the temperatures in Africa are warmer.

The square that lives in the Gobi Desert in this respect, lives in one of the warmest regions of the earth and therefore has the largest ears, relative to its body, in the animal world.