If you could have any animal feature what would it be? (must be 250 words)

What characteristics or traits of an animal would you choose — at least for a day?
A trunk, a tail, wings or stripes? How about the acute vision of an owl? Or the speed of a cheetah? Eight arms like an octopus? Gills to allow you to breathe underwater? Bat ears for echolocation in the dark? The ability to change color and camouflage like chameleons?
Explain how your life would be different and what you would do with your new animal powers.

An elephant’s trunk is a marvel of biology. Devoid of any joints or bone, the trunk is an appendage made of pure muscle that is capable of both uprooting trees and gingerly plucking individual leaves and also boasts a sense of smell more powerful than a bomb-sniffing dog’s.

Elephants use their trunks in a variety of ways. They use it to drink, store and spray water, and they also blow air through it to communicate — their 110-decibel bellows can be heard for miles.

“It’s like a muscular multitool,” said Andrew Schulz, a mechanical engineering doctoral student at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

In a study published Wednesday in The Journal of the Royal Society Interface, Mr. Schulz and his colleagues reported on how elephants can use their trunks for yet another function: applying suction to grab food, a behavior previously thought to be exclusive to fishes.

Despite the ubiquity of elephants in children’s books and nature documentaries, there are numerous gaps in scientific knowledge about the biomechanics of their trunks that the new study helps fill. For example, the most recent detailed account of elephant trunk anatomy is a hand-drawn monograph that was published in 1908, Mr. Schulz said.

Contrary to popular belief, the trunk does not act like a straw.

“What they do is actually drink water into their trunk and they store it,” Mr. Schulz said. “So the elephant trunk is actually like a trunk.”