Substantive posts will be thin on the ground until the end of October, as I’m off to NYC on Thursday and to Bulgaria two days after I return to Chicago (next Monday). What with the final version of the Albatross due Thursday, it’s lucky I can post anything.
So go read Natalie Angier’s nice piece on giraffes in today’s New York Times. Setting aside one gaffe (one researcher calls the beast a “gentle giant and the world’s most graceful animal,” though we know that any species of felid can beat them by a neck in gracefulness), the piece packed with interesting information, including new data on the giraffe’s complex social life. It turns out that, until recently, we knew nothing about the world’s tallest animal. Here’s one bit about their physiology:
Also of interest is the giraffe’s exceptional cardiovascular system. A large giraffe can stand 20 feet tall — the height of a second-story window — with its neck accounting for roughly a third its span and its long legs the same. The multitiered challenge, then, is how to both pump blood very high and retrieve it from far below while avoiding burst capillaries in the brain or blood pooling around the hooves.
As part of the Danish Cardiovascular Giraffe Research Program, scores of scientists have traveled to South Africa to study giraffe physiology. They have measured blood pressure at different sites and found readings that range from high to ridiculous — up to five times human blood pressure — yet with none of the organ damage commonly seen in hypertensive patients.
Instead, the giraffe has extremely thick blood vessel walls to prevent blood from leaking into surrounding tissue, while rugged, inflexible collagen fibers in its neck and legs help keep the blood traffic moving, rather as the tight antigravity suits worn by astronauts and fighter pilots will maintain blood flow under the most extreme gravitational shifts. A complex mesh of capillaries and valves store and release blood in the neck, allowing the giraffe to bend over for a drink of water and then raise its head again quickly without fainting; when the giraffe is standing still, sphincters at the top of the legs limit circulation to the lower extremities, to minimize the risk of fluid buildup around the hooves.
Researchers were also surprised to find that contrary to old textbook wisdom, giraffes do not have unusually large hearts for animals their size. “It’s half a percent of body mass, and that’s the same as we see in a cow, dog or mouse,” said Christian Aalkjaer of the department of biomedicine at Aarhus University in Denmark.
Moreover, Dr. Aalkjaer and his colleagues have determined that the giraffe’s cardiac output — the amount of blood pumped into circulation each minute — is modest, proportionally lower than it is in humans. That finding could help explain why giraffes rarely run for very long: Their hearts can’t deliver oxygen to their muscles fast enough to power extended aerobic exertion.
There’s also some information about their nerves two (I’ve discussed the giraffe’s recurrent laryngeal nerve in WEIT as evidence for evolution; see GrrlScientist’s post on it).
Or maybe the giraffes are worried about tripping over their own feet. Heather More and Shawn O’Connor of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and their colleagues measured so-called sensorimotor responsiveness in the giraffe: how long it takes a nerve signal to travel from a muscle in the ankle up to the brain and back again. Reporting in The Journal of Experimental Biology, the researchers found that the nerve conduction rate in the giraffe is pretty much the same as it is in a shrew, rat or any other mammal.
Given the comparatively greater distance a nerve signal has to travel in the giraffe, Dr. More said, it’s possible the giraffe faces real challenges in reacting quickly to events down under — a rock beneath its hoof, or a bite to its ankle.
Perhaps. I went and looked briefly at the JEB paper reported above, which estimates the delay between nerve stimulation and the arrival of the information in the spinal cord. I quote from the paper:
We estimate a total conduction distance of 2.3 m for these sensory fibers based on our leg length measurements (1.8 m; Table 1) and our estimated nerve length between the femoral head and spinal cord (0.5 m). Using our measured motor conduction velocity as an approximation of sensory conduction velocity, we estimate that the conduction delay between the foot and the spinal cord would be 46 ms.
That’s 0.046 seconds, not an appreciable delay to my mind. The problem with the recurrent laryngeal nerve, which goes from the larynx down the neck, loops around the heart, and comes back up to the brain (a length of 15 feet in giraffes but also several superfluous feet in humans), is not the delay in getting nerve impulses to the brain, but the danger of injury to a nerve that can be damaged by a blow to the chest.
What Angier doesn’t note is that getting that information involved killing four giraffes. Was it worth it? Well, the workers apparently did this as part of a larger study. To be fair, I note that their paper says this:
Electrophysiology procedures and tissue collection were carried out simultaneously with many other research projects during the 2010 Danish Cardiovascular Giraffe Research Programme expedition to Hammanskraal, South Africa. Due to the nature of these multi-experiment protocols, we performed each procedure on only four of the eight animals. Experiments and procedures were approved by the Danish Animal Ethics Committee, the Animal Ethics Screening Committee at The University of Witwatersrand (Johannesburg), the Animal Use and Care Committee of the University of Pretoria (South Africa) and the Simon Fraser University Office of Research Ethics. Permission to euthanize the animals was granted by Gauteng Province, South Africa.
One has, then, to balance the lives of these four giraffes against all the information gathered before they killed them. Will it help the species, and perhaps prevent its drastic reduction in numbers? I hope so. Or will it help humans with hypertension? All too often in the past, researchers killed animals willy-nilly, either to get specimens for museums or to do studies that did nothing to help the species itself. Animals were regularly tortured and mistreated in the lab—until ethical standards for animal care were implemented over the last few decades.
Still, I think that researchers always need to thinl about balancing the need to satisfy their curiosity (and to save endangered species or help our own species), against the fact that animals must to some degree value their own lives, and many certainly feel pain. Even I always anesthetized my fruit flies before I put them in the “morgue” (a coffee can full of motor oil). When I was in college, I didn’t even want to kill my fruit flies and would go up to the roof of the biology department to release them. But my advisor caught me one day and told me I couldn’t do that, for I was polluting the natural gene pool.
I will, however, admit that I eat meat, and I feel bad about being a bit of a hypocrite.
🐪closest to giraffe I could find
We’re all a bit of a hypocrite when it comes to our relationships to other animals. I don’t eat mammals or birds or reptiles. But I do eat fish and seafood and feel somewhat guilty about that.
“I will, however, admit that I eat meat, and I feel bad about being a bit of a hypocrite.”
Readers may be interested in taking a look at this NY Times piece:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/how-similar-are-human-and-animal-suffering/
The comments are worth looking at too…
This bit I found particularly unconvincing:
“Most farm animals are raised on intensive factory farms where they suffer for the majority of their short lives. Even small, high-welfare farms tend to subject their animals to at least some painful procedures like castration without anesthetic, dehorning or the separation of mothers and their newborn children.
“Yet ultra-high-welfare animal products are a possibility, not a fantasy. Consider the highest level of the “5-Step” animal-welfare rating program at Whole Foods Market. For beef, this prohibits branding, castration, ear notching, separating mothers from calves for early weaning and long trips to the slaughterhouse. For pigs, this ensures they are never separated from their littermates, which is important because of how social pigs are. For chickens, it means they have plenty of space and don’t have to endure physical alterations like debeaking.
“Almost no farms meet these standards, but if more of us were willing to compromise on the price, taste, quantity and texture of the meat we eat, more farms like this could exist and thrive.”
Once you notice how he glosses over the practical realities, you realize this is using hypothetical niceties to rationalize away perceived problems with animal treatment. It’s not even as if his bizarre idea that death is neutral (making suffering the only problem) and his suggestion isn’t glaring in itself: of exploiting the ignorant (by killing them) so long as we bribe our consciences by pampering them first.
Certainly, too many ARAs rely on the glib and thoughtless rhetorical force of equating cattle raising with holocausts. It’s no problem asking questions about how much we should cater to animals’ interests compared with our own. But the bizarre rationalizations of those who prefer meat strike me as compartmentalization more than anything. He even acknowledges the unfortunate implication in his arguments at times, but then never does anything with them.
The current state of biological research certainly has some grey areas around fish, lobsters, and insects, but it should be enough to know that the confidence in feeling humanlike pain is comparatively unanimous when it comes to the animals most often used for food (cattle, pigs, sheep, and chickens).
The problem with the giraffe is that its neck is far too short – in order to drink it has to spread its legs so that it can reach the water.
Maybe we are seeing an example of an evolutionary constraint. They cannot evolve longer necks without having smaller brains or something.
A drinking giraffe also undermines the most graceful animal claim.
Concern about animal suffering is one reason I now work with plants. (I started with birds.) I will still make specimens from road kill, etc. Once they’re dead, they don’t suffer. And of course plants are easier to catch than birds.
Some days I even feel sorry for the plants I dig up. Sigh.
Findings on the ‘athletic’ performance and endurance differ. For example:
“Theoretically, VO2max is reached at the relatively low running speed of 18.7 ± 1.2 km/h (Taylor et al., 1980; Table 2), which classifies giraffe as a non-athletic species (Weibel et al., 2004). This physiological conclusion supports historical observations but is contrary to more recent observations of giraffe athletic performance. For example Dagg and Foster (1976) have reported that giraffes can outrun most horses and can set up a steady pace which they can continue for several hours. Langman et al. (1982) reported that giraffes can run at 65 km/h for 5 min.” Mitchell & Skinner. 2011. Comp Biochem Physiol A 158 72-78.
The venous valves in giraffe story goes back at least to 1947 (Amoroso et al. 1947. Proc Zool. Soc. Lond. 117 435-440).
Jerry,
You’ve been looking at so many grocer’s apostrophes that you’re using them yourself. You’ve corrected it now, but I caught you.
“scores of scientists have traveled to South Africa to study giraffe physiology” me smells an excuse for a paid vacation!!
Side note: Giraffe are culled and hunted for various reasons. loosing four examples to science is not very dramatic or really even worth mentioning.
Google “giraffe hunting” if you want to be upset. I am not sure why someone would shoot one of these gentle creatures for sport. It’s beyond me.
What is worse is these are likely in game parks, where animals are released into a controlled area to be hunted down by paying sportsmen.
That’s exactly how it works. There is a bit of a movement to ban canned hunt’s. Especially of lions
I am torn on the issue.
It’s seems like it might be better to breed the animals for slaughter (It’s what farmers do with cows, pis and sheep, just a different animal right?) and it keeps the gene pool larger.
Is it moral to treat lions (or any other animals this way? Probably not. But it has to be less damaging to the ecosystem than hunting the last few animals in the wild, where they are artificially removed from the eco system.
The big objection seems to be that consumers are being ripped off! But is it ever a fair fight when one of the mammals has a rifle ?
An argument can be made for properly-managed “wildlife” preserves which are funded by “hunters” who “harvest” the animals therein. It’s inferior to a true wildlife preserve in which the predators and prey are responsible for balancing their own populations — more prey means more predators, but more predators means fewer prey. But there’s no short-term financial incentive for the human landowners to sustain such a model, and so one with human intervention and management is a not-too-terribly-unreasonable pragmatic alternative.
But to truly be ethical it’d require a bizarre mix of species rare enough to both warrant protection and be desirable “hunting” trophies, but not so rare as to be critically endangered.
The real enemy here is habitat loss from encroachment by exponentially-growing human populations. Until we get our own numbers in check, other species are in for an incredibly tough ride.
If you wish to preserve charismatic African megafauna…the absolute best thing you could do would be to make birth control free and universally accessible there and to simultaneously invest in modernizing the infrastructure of those who live there. Give them the material security of a Western middle-class lifestyle so they don’t need to rely on large families for personal security, and couple it with don’t-even-have-to-think-about-it ways to keep families to personally-affordable sizes (empirically demonstrated in Western nations to be slightly below population replacement rates), and Bob’s yer uncle. It doesn’t even have to come with the environmental impacts traditionally associated with Western wealth; Germany is demonstrating how civilization works even better with renewable energy and high efficiency, and there’s no reason we can’t directly bootstrap the developing world right to that level and bypass the messiness of the Industrial Revolution.
b&
The real enemy here is habitat loss from encroachment by exponentially-growing human populations.
That’s a good chunk of it, certainly, but the other chunk is having a collection of highly destructive economies, such as excessive mining and fossil fuel extraction industries, landfills, clearance for raising livestock in wasteful ways, environmentally destructive crop-growing practices (such as using certain pesticides), and a general industrial exploitation of poor peoples who have no other real alternatives to these many procedures of earning a living. You could halt or even reverse population growth, and these problems would still persist.
That’s why I pointed to Germany. They’re leading the charge on renewable energy production and efficiency, and their economy is booming compared to their competitors as a result.
We need to approach the problem from all angles. Realistically, people simply aren’t interested in living in poverty. You just can’t sell austerity. Fortunately, though, efficiency — by its very nature! — is a form of prosperity. If you can do with one gallon of gas what your neighbor needs two to accomplish, you’re wealthier than your neighbor; the money that your neighbor spends on gas you can instead use on something more profitable.
The same principle applies throughout. If you have a choice between giving ten grand to an agribusiness chemical company and giving them nothing but spending four thousand more on labor and still losing four thousand dollars in produce, you’re still two grand more profitable than if you had given that money to the agribusiness giant. That’s especially the case where modern agricultural practices increase year-to-year yields at the expense of topsoil erosion and residue buildup and other generational problems which destroy the land after so many years; you’re literally eating your seed corn in such instances, something farmers have known the folly of since before any of us knew how to write.
Cheers,
b&
Well yes, but that works only so long as economic efficiency correlates with environmental protection. The instant they no longer coincide, the argument from innovation becomes a curse rather than a blessing. Renewable energy might be the future, but if it’s more efficient for businesses to stick to oil and gas, that’s where the companies will stay.
It also relies on everybody being impartial and public-spirited. A parochial and self-interested petrol company is not going to allow its market to be swayed by news that Germany’s renewable energy industry is more efficient for the whole of society.
Lastly, it neglects the information war. Mining for copper might be highly damaging and polluting, but once you have national pride in it and can keep the costs down by skimping on any kind of health and safety measures (or better still, campaign to oppose the implementation of such measures legally), an unscrupulous company can get away with it. And if you can denigrate environmentalists in the process, all the better.
The first step isn’t to innovate and hope environmentally friendly industries supersede their less friendly rivals via market competition. The first step is to stop the interested parties from manipulating the media and subverting democratic processes.
Monbiot outlines one of the problems here:
http://www.monbiot.com/2014/09/11/political-straightjacket/
But that’s the thing: integrate over sufficient time periods, and it becomes a truism. It’s quite sustainable to heat your home by burning your floorboards and rafters in the fireplace, so long as “sustainable” is defined for a sufficiently short period of time. But over longer periods of time, it’s clearly more economically efficient to be less immediately destructive of your home, even at the expense of short-term profit.
No, but, first, those companies, despite their political power, are outnumbered and outpowered by the rest of society. In a very real sense they only own their resources by the consent of the rest of the population. If the balance tips too far, they’ll first face legal constraints and eventually be nationalized, even against their will.
Secondly…there’s no more cheap petroleum to mine. Like it or not, it’s only ever going to get increasingly more expensive to extract remaining petroleum reserves. Solar power, on the other hand, is in its technological infancy and already near price-parity with petroleum. Rising petroleum prices will cause inflation that’ll increase the costs of everything, including alternative energy sources…but those alternatives not only won’t rise nearly as fast as petroleum, they may well manage to keep getting cheaper, just not at as fast a rate. As such, it won’t be all that long before the alternatives, though still quite expensive by historical standards, will nevertheless be cheaper than that future day’s petroleum. At that point, assuming civilization hasn’t collapsed due to the burdensome cost of energy, the simple economic tipping point will shut off the oil spigot. When it’s a choice between paying $200 / barrel for fossil fuel crude of not that great quality and $180 / barrel for pure syngas made with solar power and atmospheric CO2 feedstock, you can bet what few dollars you’ll have left that nobody’s going to spend that extra $20 / barrel on the inferior product.
In the short term? Certainly.
But, in the long term, either you’ll have a worker uprising or you’ll kill off your own population or other national resources and thereby get out-competed by those who manage their own resources for the long haul.
Again, how many of your floorboards are you willing to toss into the fireplace?
b&
But that’s the thing: integrate over sufficient time periods, and it becomes a truism.
And what’s sufficient time to a petrol company? You can’t just rely on the fact that their industry is based on a finite resource. There’s no law of happy endings that ensures environmental damage will out. By the time we’re forced to use renewable resources, three quarters of the planet surface would probably have lost what little biodiversity and ecosystem components it still has. This is before we mention what effect it might have on humanity. Just read Jared Diamond’s Collapse for a comprehensive historical account of what happens when you make the assumption that the environment will cater to rational actors in the long run.
No, but, first, those companies, despite their political power, are outnumbered and outpowered by the rest of society. In a very real sense they only own their resources by the consent of the rest of the population. If the balance tips too far, they’ll first face legal constraints and eventually be nationalized, even against their will.
I think you overestimate their chances. Most of them don’t operate on a fair play free market system because they have backdoors into the political processes that should be keeping them in check. They’re still in power despite it being obvious that society neither needs nor can really afford them, because they know how to spin PR in their favour (for the most part). Being outnumbered and especially “outpowered” hasn’t stopped them so far, and while environmental measures have increased sufficiently, it’s also a case of slamming the brakes and the accelerator at the same time. The market certainly isn’t going to intervene to stop them.
Secondly…there’s no more cheap petroleum to mine.
Again, this doesn’t mean that a finite resource automatically promises a bright future for environmentalist concerns. Waiting for the companies to run out of fuel is essentially to hope the biggest obstacle to preventing environmental damage and AGW will suddenly collapse soon enough for us to reverse CO2 levels to safe levels. Public campaigning and turning the current situation around ASAP is not equivalent to waiting for a relatively impoverished sustainable economy to be forced on society by necessity.
In the short term? Certainly.
But, in the long term, either you’ll have a worker uprising or you’ll kill off your own population or other national resources and thereby get out-competed by those who manage their own resources for the long haul.
The short term is all they need. The observation that eating excess fatty foods leads to premature increase in heart conditions hasn’t naturally led to a decrease in obesity. It just means people eat and be damned.
No, relying on economic necessity is not going to solve the problem. It’s going to condemn rainforests and oceans to a gamble heavily stacked against them. Why do you think responses to AGW have been so meagre and limpid these last few decades? Because corporate power and political manipulation has enabled interested parties to distort, distract from, and deny the truth to suit their economic conveniences. Relying on these same forces to fix the problem is like relying on the rats, pigs, and dogs to not eat the last dodo eggs.
First, I’ll be the first to admit that we may very well be fucked. But the end result of that is extinction of humanity, possible in yet another catastrophic global extinction event, followed by some tens or hundreds of millions of years of low biological diversity before things stabilize again on an entirely different biosphere. Sucks for us, but the pendulum will keep swinging back so long as the Sun keeps shining at roughly the right temperature. My point is that we actually do have reason for some hope, if not necessarily great hope.
On your tangent:
Actually, you’ve got your observations not quite right. People have reduced their fat intake by the recommended amounts…and, quite unsurprisingly, substituted the fats for a calorically-equal amount of “low-fat” and “non-fat” sugars. And the increase in the rate of the metabolic syndrome has perfectly paralleled the increase in sugar consumption, even going back to colonial times and the start of the sugar triangle trade routes.
That’s a perfect demonstration of why it’s so important to base your models on careful observation and sound reasoning — and also why you shouldn’t be too reluctant to revise your models when new evidence indicates you should.
To your other point, the sugar lobby is unbelievably powerful, and it’ll take a fight not unlike what it took with the tobacco companies to reverse the damage — and a similar fight with the oil companies.
But, either we’ll win that fight, or we’ll all die. One way or another, the current state of affairs isn’t going to continue without change.
b&
I’m not saying we have reason to lose hope. I’m saying that there’s a certain way to realize that hope, and a specific way not to. If it helps, I had Martin Luther King Jr’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail in mind, in which he criticized the assumption that time would inevitably sort out the problem of racism. By contrast, he insisted racism would vanish because people were actively working for the alternative, rather than passively expecting it to arise inevitably. He called it the myth of time. I apologise if I misread your comments from that angle, but that’s how it looked to me.
Granted, I will acknowledge bad choice of example in invoking fat intake, though. I admit my impressions were more based on general exposure to the problem in the media than a systematic statistical survey. This didn’t do me any favours, I see. I apologise for this too, and take this example back.
I won’t deny, though, that the disparity between the scientific world’s discoveries in AGW and the public’s dismal acceptance rate doesn’t instil much confidence in me that humanity is automatically self-correcting. It does mean we’ve got work to do if we want to knock the denialists from their cushy thrones.
Waiting for millions of years for the biosphere to continue without us, understandably, doesn’t strike me as an option worth waiting for.
Nor me, but that’s the result of the choice of continuing to burn the floorboards, eat the seed corn, and otherwise carry on with business as usual.
The point I’m trying to make is that the way forward is…well…forward, and not backwards. If we want to get out of this mess, we’re not going to do so by starving ourselves — any more than you’re going to improve your health by starving yourself.
What we need to do is make ourselves richer, not poorer — and the way to do that is with long-term strategies, again in the spirit of what Germany is doing today.
It’s in your own selfish best interests, especially financially, to go solar and reduce household waste and all the rest. It’ll cost you upfront capital to invest in rooftop solar, for example, but it’ll pay for itself in under a decade, which blows the pants off of any market instrument you could invest in — and, further, you’ve thereby locked in your electricity prices for the rest of your life. Electric vehicles are borderline financial cases; for many, they’re a no-brainer but for others don’t make sense…but EV prices are plummeting and soon you’d have to be a fool to buy a new gasoline car — plus, once you remove money from the equation, petroleum-powered cars can’t hold a candle to EVs. We were discussing LED bulbs in the Nobel thread; same deal there, again.
What I’m arguing against is this notion that, to save ourselves and the ecosystem we love and are dependent on, we not only don’t need to abandon technology and progress and comfort; indeed, the exact opposite is true.
What we need to do is be smarter about how we live the good life, which not only lets us live even better good lives but (hopefully, if it’s not already too late) ensures that we don’t wind up dead.
Cheers,
b&
I agree! I’m not asking for technology to go back to the “shivering in the cold” days. If anything, I was saying that the people who insist technology stands still for them (the oil and petrol companies, for instance) by doing everything in their power to oppose such innovations should be booted off their high horses so we can get on with it. That requires challenging their power more often, more widely, and more directly than what’s going on at the moment. It is, in a word, a call for mobilisation.
To bring this back round to our starting posts, the first step to stemming current habitat loss is to push and campaign harder against (mostly) corporate, economic, and political powers that would prefer the current, unsustainable status quo. That way, we can more intelligently address those industries that currently cause environmental damage, address power inequalities and injustices produced by such a system, replace them by building the sustainable infrastructures you recommend that would serve society in the long run, and so kerb further environmental damage.from habitat destruction.
That’s important, yet…but even more important is to put our money where our mouths are, walk the talk, and all that jazz — again, as Germany is doing. If I’m right that solar and efficiency result in more wealth and luxury despite the initial capital costs, then I’d be silly and / or hypocritical to not put solar panels on my roof and install low-e windows and freshen up the attic insulation and the like, right? Well, as it turns out, I’ve done exactly that, and I now generate half again as much electricity as I use — enough such that, when I finally get an electric vehicle of some sort on the road, I’ll be able to drive for free. And how is driving for free not an example of wealth and luxury?
We certainly need the regulation you describe, but it’s just a stopgap. The long-term solution is to develop a civilization that doesn’t even want to rip up the floorboards in the first place.
Cheers,
b&
Natalie Angier is a fine writer and thinker. In our appreciation of this piece, it’s worth harkening back to her 2006 essay in Edge, “My God Problem,” which Jerry wrote about here in 2012:
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/06/08/natalie-angier-on-her-god-problem/
“A neck?”
Heck.
For speed and strength,
At least a length.
A “gentle giant and the world’s most graceful animal”? Cat’s have trumps on grace and anyone who has seen two male giraffes fighting for mating rights would never call them gentle. These neck slapping battles hold little back and can result in serious injury or even death.
http://goo.gl/0IKXIg
I loved the video in which Richard Dawkins, present at a rare dissection of a giraffe, pointed out the recurrent laryngeal nerve as a good example of how, if there IS a “designer”, he’s not very “intelligent”.
I remember from reading Climbing mount Improbable that the giraffe’s neck contains a mere seven vertebrae, the same number of vertebrae that humans and almost all other mammals have.
(Imagined creationist reply: “See, that just shows the signature of God’s universal law, hence the existence of God.
If the giraffe’s neck had a different number of vertebrae, that would serve as a proof of uncommon descent too).
Why do we know so little about the social life of Giraffes? I cannot think of an easier animal to study in the wild.
I would hope that animals in zoos who die or need to be euthanized for other reasons would be regularly used for studies such as these, and at least as cadavers for study by students of veterinary medicine. Seems to me that there ought to be more than enough such examples already available to obviate the need to use wild animals for study.
Human cadavers are readily available for research and study, and we don’t feel the need to get random fresh samples; why should other species be any different?
b&
They have an incredible lifespan. 20 years or so I believe.
Long wait….
I mentioned in earlier comment: so many are hunted in Southern Africa that culling 4 examples is barely worth mentioning (unfortunately…)
Yes, but if there were even only twenty giraffes in all the zoos, that would mean an average wait of but one per year. And I think it safe to suggest that there’re a few more than merely twenty giraffes in zoos worldwide….
Most fruit trees take at least a few years, if not several years or even some decades, before producing any fruit or reaching peak productivity. It’s therefore rather expensive to get started, what with having to care for them for all that time before you can even sell a single piece of fruit yet still having to tend to them. But, once that initial period is over, with smart management, a given orchard should always produce roughly the same yield indefinitely. Each year you’ll plant the same number of new trees, and each year you’ll remove the exact same number as you plant, with the same total numbers each of one-, two-, and twenty-year-old-trees in the orchard.
Such is already the case for zoo animals.
b&
“I will, however, admit that I eat meat, and I feel bad about being a bit of a hypocrite.”
That’s easy, PCC – just stop! It’s not difficult (easier than it ever was) and the benefits far, far, far outweigh any drawbacks.
For those more interested in tracing the largyneal nerve, Richard Dawkins narrated a giraffe dissection that actually traced the nerve all the way down the neck and back.
Years ago I visited a game park in Southern Ontario and a giraffe wandered over to the car to see if we had any noms.
Thing was… there was a set of legs on the back left, then a large head, and a huge purple tongue appeared near the front right window which was about half open.
Bunch of Breton crackers disappeared vertically in a few seconds!
The kids thought it was fantastic.
African Lion Safari? We had a similar experience with a giraffe there, and I think a banana. My kids loved it, too. Also the baboons pulling the trim off cars and trading the parts in their junkyard in the bushes. A few years ago some exotic dancer bimbo sued the park for huge damages when her rolled down window would not go back up before the lions did a number on her. She won:-(
Yes, that was where it was!
I don’t live in that area any more, is it still going?
Some wipers and trim pieces certainly took a beating from the baboons and monkeys.
Think it’s still going. Haven’t been in 20 years or so.
There was a wildlife series that aired here in NZ (last year if I am right) with the most extraordinary footage of two male giraffes, one older and a young upstart competeting for the attention of a female, also present at this very remote location.
From memory, I can only describe it as such, a sword fight using a neck and a head. Powerful blows were inflicted on each other. They would pull their heads right back and swing in a full arc. This went on until the older of the two dropped the younger to the deck. It all looked like slow motion but the wounds from the impacts looked very nasty. In the end, the vanquished remained lying down in stunned submission until he had recouporated enough to get up and high tail it.
The cameraman was beside himself as he had never seen anything like it and as far as he knew it had never been recorded before.
Sorry but I can’t give you a link but it is worth watching and it was shot in HD as well.
I haven’t got time right now but if I find a link I will post it here.
I saw thst giraffe neck whacking video just last month. It was in a David Attenborough series called Africa, I think, and we borrowed it from our local library. The whole series is great, but that giraffe part was one of the more spectacular. And the old guy won! (It always gets me in these battles that the female doesn’t seem to get a choice between the pissing contest rivals:-(
Thanks for that, but in the end she gets a powerful male’s genes to mix with hers to pass on to her off spring and at the risk of doing serious damage to itself in an unforgiving environment the male could have paid a heavy cost for this right.
It isn’t that way in all species…remember the birds of paradise from a little while back? The males put on the best show they can with all the females watching, and the females pick the male they’re suitably impressed with.
b&
I think you’re right, Ben, about the birds of paradise, and probably some others. But I think in general the winning male gets to choose (because often the loser is dead…) A few years ago I was awakened at 4AM by 2 ducks fighting in the little bit of water that had collected on my neighbor’s pool cover. They were really going at it and what I’m sure was the female was pacing back and forth on the side, quacking away, until she finally just flew away in disgust…
Smart girl…wonder if the guys figured out what happened and why….
b&
probably not:-( Probably figured they might as well fight some more before buggering off.
I was going to leave a message on my neighbor’s answering machine to “shut the duck up”, but he still had youngish children at the time.
All the better! He couldn’t possibly take offense at such a thing without admitting the rhyme….
b&
Having often seen them in the wild, I can assert that they are extremely graceful animals.
Of course the real reason they have such long necks is that without them there would be a huge gap between the head and shoulders.
Having grown up in South Africa and spending a lot of time in game parks around southern Africa, I though I had a reasonable idea about giraffe appearance. On a trip to East Africa a few years ago, one of the most noticeable differences in the animals there was the pattern of the giraffes, which I had thought was standard. I have since discovered that there are nine difference sub species, separated by region and distinguished by pattern.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giraffe#Subspecies.
Cool! I had only been aware of reticulated vs “spotted”.