Workers load a West
African giraffe into
a trailer. Later it will
be moved 500 miles
to Niger’s northeast
Gadabedji Biosphere
Reserve to help grow
a new population of
the subspecies, which
has about 600 animals.The giraffe has the highest known blood
pressure of any animal, and yet somehow it can
manage to quickly drop its head 16 or 17 feet to
the ground without passing out. Because it’s
so difficult for them to get up and down, and
because they’re so vulnerable when they’re on
the ground, giraffes only seem to sleep for a
few minutes at a time (a phenomenon difficult
to observe in the wild). They can go for weeks
without water by hydrating only with the mois-
ture they suck from leaves. It took five years of
observing giraffes in the deserts of Namibia
before the GCF’s Fennessy, perhaps the world’s
leading expert on giraffes, ever saw one splay its
legs and dip its head awkwardly to drink from
a ground puddle. Witnessing this gawky effort
to obtain the most basic sustenance makes one
wonder if the right question to ask isn’t why the
giraffe has such a long neck, but rather, why is it
so short relative to such long legs?
In truth we still don’t know why the giraffe
has such a long neck. According to Nikos Sou-
lounias, an evolutionary biologist at the New York
Institute of Technology, the giraffe evolved on
the Indian subcontinent and migrated to Africa
from Asia some eight million years ago. Its closest
living relative, the okapi, which lives in the equa-
torial rainforests of the Democratic Republic of
the Congo, noticeably lacks its cousin’s long neck.
Giraffes are naturally topiarists, eating the
acacias into hourglass profiles that fan up at the
top, just above the “browse line” where the ani-
mals’ towering necks and outstretched tongues
can no longer reach, and so it would make sense
that the long neck evolved to open up a feeding
niche unavailable to shorter species. But some
researchers have suggested that the giraffe’s long
neck is actually a function of sexual selection. Its
principal benefit is not for foraging in the upper
reaches of trees but rather for males to more
effectively club each other with their pendulous
heads, outfitted with extra-thick skulls, when
competing for females in heat. Or perhaps the
giraffe’s long neck is simply to give an otherwise
fairly defenseless animal a high vantage point to
watch the horizon for predators.
Undoubtedly linked to the giraffe’s long neck
is its eerie silence. Giraffes almost never make a
sound and don’t communicate with each other
using any kind of signaling audible to human
ears. Their silence is especially bizarre given that
they’re social creatures that live in a fission-fusion
society, in which groups of individuals frequently
IN 2016 SOME SCIENTISTS
CAME TO AN EPIPHANY
ABOUT GIRAFFES.
GENETICS REVEALED THAT
THE ANIMALS HAVE FOUR
DISTINCT SPECIES, NOT
JUST A SINGLE ONE.108 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC