Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. Not only COVID-19 is
still going on strongly, this morning we had a very nasty snowstorm.
Fortuitously, we stayed inside, and now the storm is over, (it is the beginning
of April, after all), and nature is coming back out – the birds are flying,
singing, fighting over their nesting territories en masse, showing just how
resilient life on Earth. The storm passed and is over; COVID-19 too will pass
and be over and life will return to normal. …Well, relatively so, seeing how
the politicians, businessmen, and who else have you, are trying to take
advantage of the lockdown and all, are trying to take advantage of the
lockdown, and it is all coming down like a great big mess; people are fleeing
into the literal woods to escape both COVID-19 and everything else. What next?
Let us talk about the giraffe. Why the giraffe? Because it
is unique. There is no other mammal on the modern planet like it. If the modern
elephants represent the last scions of an ancient dynasty of herbivorous
mammals that fell due to the competition with the artiodactyl mammals, then the
modern giraffe is one of those evolutionary cousins of the main dynasty – aka
the antelopes, gazelles, wild cattle, sheep and goats – that had its’ heyday in
the past, (the Miocene & the Pliocene epochs), but is largely gone, these
days.
Pause. The entire taxonomic-biological family of the giraffe
consists of the giraffe, and the okapi, aka the forest giraffe. Frankly, the
latter name is not used very often, because the okapi is only like the giraffe
in the most generic ways; you can see the family similarity, but nothing more.
With an effort, you can confuse an Asian elephant with an African one, or an
Asian rhinoceros with an African one, but an okapi with a giraffe? Just no.
…The families of the okapi and the giraffe have diverged during the Miocene
slash the Pliocene, around 11.5 MYA, and the two have never been in contact
since.
The okapi family is represented by a single species – the
okapi itself. The giraffe, on the other hand, is murkier, as people in charge
of biological classification still have not made their mind as to if there is
just a single giraffe species, or four of them, or what. Even if there is just
a single giraffe species, it may have up to nine subspecies, which is a lot.
…Of course, with humans hunting them for all sorts of reasons, or even without
any reasons at all, because we humans can be assholes, they may not be around
for much longer, but that is not a good thing.
…Yes, COVID-19 has hit humans, even in Africa, hard, so they
may not be up for the giraffes, but no one knows exactly how it affects other
animals; for example, a tiger in Bronx zoo was discovered to have it; and with
giraffes slash okapis, it is anyone’s guess.
So, why is the giraffe so unique? Because it is a very
specialized animal – it is not big: it is tall. A good portion of the giraffe
is its’ disproportionally long neck and legs; the neck, I think, amounts for
about half of the giraffe’s body length, (while in case of the okapi it is
about 30%, on average). Just like a human’s, the okapi’s and the giraffe’s neck
consist of only 7 vertebra, but the giraffe’s are the most massive one out of
the three by far, both in size and in weight. Isn’t trivia fun?
What next? …Um, aside from the humans, the main enemies of
the giraffe are the African lion and the Nile crocodile; no one else really
wants to tackle and fully-grown giraffe – compared to an elephant or a
rhinoceros they may look like great big fragile land kites or something, but their
head-butts are painful, and their kicks can be deadly. African lions, however,
are known to tackle African bush elephants, (not fully grown, but not just
calves either), who are even stronger than the giraffes are, and so they do
overpower giraffes by working as a team, on occasion.
The Nile crocodile, on the other hand, is more of a case by
case situation – it is a solitary hunter; crocodiles of these species may
gather together to feed, (their anatomy of jaws and teeth makes it easier for
them to feed together, rather than separately, on something bigger than what
they can just swallow whole)… where were we?
Ah yes, unlike the African lion, the Nile crocodile is a
solitary hunter, but a social feeder, especially if the prey is big – say, a
dead African hippo. Then the not-quite-social crocodiles gather and tolerate each
other, more or less, as they feed – with ‘tolerate’ being the key word here.
The African lions hunt together, (though there is plenty of case-by-case
variation there), and their society is quite complex, (cough, TLK is full of
baloney, cough), but they and the Nile crocodiles do not have anything in
common aside from both of them living in Africa.
…Yes, we have discussed the ‘African lion vs. Nile crocodile’
AFO episode a while back, and spoiler alert – the lion lost, (and the giraffe was
not involved at all), which is fair: a male African lion is a fighter, but it
is a team fighter, and on its own, it rather has a disadvantage against the
crocodile. Plus, on that episode team AFO really did its’ homework, and their
deduction that the Nile crocodile was a better fighter than the African lion
was justified, so there!
Back to the giraffe? Er, did it leave while we were dealing
with the lion and the crocodile? Why, we have not even mentioned the non-avian theropod
dinosaurs, aka the meat-eaters, are the goal of a real discussion of whether
they did hunt together as the African lions do, or just fed together, as the
Nile crocodiles? And what did they feed upon? Sauropods, among other things,
just look at the second episode of WWD, or the fifth episode of ‘Planet
Dinosaur’ (2013), for example! Are sauropods like the giraffe?
No, not exactly. Some are – that is the Brachiosaurus and
its’ relatives. Others are not – rather, they are big, (aka the elephant) – that
is Argentinosaurus and the rest of the titanosaurs; or they are just long – aka
Diplodocus and its’ relatives, (including the Apatasaurus). Yes, we are
generalizing here so hard, but the thing is that many of the sauropods were
built different from the giraffe, and many of them were not built like it.
Moreover, neither was the extinct Indricotherium, or
whatever it is named now, (see the third episode of ‘Walking with Beasts’). Just
like the extinct titanosaurs, or the existing elephants, it was big rather than
tall, and quite proportionate. Why did it die out? Because not unlike the
giraffe it was a specialized mammal, designed to eating foliage, and as the
savannas, prairies, steppes, etc. spread, the Indricotherium could no longer
survive. With the modern giraffe – it is pretty much the same thing: the
giraffe survives alongside all of those antelopes and gazelles by being the
best foliage eater in the African grasslands – a very specialized niche, to be
sure, but it does allow the giraffe to survive over more of Africa as opposed
to the more generalized okapi, which exists only in parts of the African
rainforest, and whose overall population is worse off than that of the giraffe.
Evolution and ecology sometimes play strange tricks upon animals!..
…Well, this is it for now; see you all soon!
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