Good Morning John, The year was 2007 and
I put a picture of a giraffe in the thumbnail of a video.
It was actually just an image from a book I have– I bet I still have the book actually.
It was this book Birds and Bees and the image was this one.
Just a couple of giraffes, having a time.
Back then the way YouTube worked, you didn’t upload your own thumbnail,
it just chose the exact middle of the video and I held that picture up as the exact middle
of the video and yeah, it got a lot of views.
That was followed up by a song in 2008, Giraffe Love Questions in 2009,
a complete introduction to Giraffe Sex in 2010,
and then, in 2016, more discussion of how giraffes mate.
But it has now been more than seven years since we last discussed giraffes on this channel.
It’s the longest giraffe drought we’ve ever had.
And I had the thought, it’s been such a long time we must,
as a species found out new things about giraffes since the last time I posted a giraffe video.
And guess what John! It’s true! There’s a bunch of stuff that we now know
about giraffes that we didn’t know when we last made a video about giraffes.
In preparation for this video I even got to email with a giraffe scientist
who is researching giraffes right now in Tanzania finding out things
that we don’t know about giraffes. So I’m going to hit you with five things
that we didn’t know in 2016 but we know them now.
Starting with how many species of giraffe there are,
which is a bit of a cheap fact because we still don’t know how many
species of giraffe there are.
But also we can’t know how many species of giraffe they are cause species
is a human idea.
Not something that nature does. But look, giraffes are SPREAD OUT.
They exist all the way from just south of the Sahara to South Africa.
That’s bigger distance than you think.
New York and London are closer together than giraffes.
You John are closer to Brazil than West African giraffes
are to South African giraffes.
But a series of whole-genome analysis
showed that we should probably not be considering giraffes one species.
There might be three, there might be four,
there might be five, there might be six.
But that conversation is super important because if you count all giraffes
as just giraffes then there’s like hundreds of thousands of giraffes.
But if you divide them up into four different species,
then some of those species are very endangered.
Now, in 2016, we thought that giraffes didn’t really vocalized.
At least not much.
Some people even thought their necks were too long to make vocalizations.
They’d make noises, they’d do like coughs and snorts and snuffles,
and they do lots of different communications with their heads and bodies.
But it was in the last seven years that we realized that giraffes do vocalize
they just do it at night often.
And in a very, very low pitched hum. Which is an amazing noise
that I do not have access to the copyright of, but I will link in the description.
It’s a beautiful noise that you can barely hear with the human ear.
And these vocalizations are part of how giraffes communicate
and maintain their culture and that’s another thing that we’ve learned
since 2016 is giraffes are intensely cultural and much smarter and more social than we thought.
And one key thing here is something
that they actually have in common with people that is very rare in the animal kingdom.
Giraffes have females that continue to survive for a long time
after they are no longer able to breed.
Like 30% of the lifespan of a female giraffe is after it is capable of making babies.
We see post-reproductive females in not very many species.
Humans, killer whales, some other kinds of whales
like pilot whales I think. Kind of elephants.
Though people will argue about elephants. And now, giraffes.
The reason we think this happens is called the grandmother hypothesis.
It’s that it happens in species when information transmission
from older to younger generations is really important.
So, like, cultural information. Knowledge and understanding needs
to have a repository in older members of the social group
so that the younger members can benefit from it.
That indicates that giraffes are much more social, and much more cultural
and have much more knowledge than we thought they did.
Alright, big shift now, cause it’s time to talk about blood pressure.
Giraffes as you might expect have very high blood pressure
because they have to get the blood to where it needs to go.
Like, high enough blood pressure that if it was your blood pressure
it would damage your heart to be pushing blood that hard.
And so researchers were like,
it’d be nice if we figure out what’s going on with the giraffes so we could help people
not get damaged hearts if they have high blood pressure, maybe?
And they actually found a gene in the giraffe
that seems to be responsible for some of the heart's resilience.
And they took that gene and they put it into mice and
they gave the mice high blood pressure artificially.
And the ones given the giraffe gene experienced way less scarring to their heart
when they had high blood pressure.
So that’s wild. I don’t know what
we’re gonna do with that, but that’s wild.
And last, as we understand how remarkable giraffes are,
how much more social they are, and also that there are a lot of species of them,
and also they’re losing a lot of their habitat and their population is decreasing quite quickly.
The conservation of giraffes becomes even more important.
Now it used to be imagined
that wildlife and people who herd animals kind of exist in opposition to each other.
And that is definitely true to some extent. Like, this relationship is extremely complicated.
But it should also be noted, that people have been herding
in Sub Saharan Africa for many millenia.
So recently there’s been a lot more research into not just the antagonistic parts
of the herder to wildlife relationship, but also the parts where the herding
people might be in some ways good for the savanna and for the wildlife.
And certainly when compared with other land uses like farming, or mining, or charcoal production.
Herding is much less impactful to the savanna and to the wildlife populations.
So if you do it right, you can see a world where
protecting traditional uses of land is actually also good for wildlife
even though we used to think that these things
were really ultimately strictly in opposition to each other.
Which I’ve been reading about
in this book called Savannas of our birth by Robin Reid.
It’s not the world's greatest clickbait thumbnail
or anything, but it is really good and fascinating.
And the thing to remember about
all of this information is that people went out and got it,
which is illustrated by this book, which looks quite long, right?
And it is, but this part is the book, and this part is the notes and references.
Which that’s a lot of references
because there’s a lot of people working on this stuff.
The scientist I emailed with said
that a lot of times we miss what giraffes are up to because they do everything so amazingly slowly.
But that doesn’t mean that we as a species cannot do it, we just need to watch,
and to listen especially to their nearly subsonic hums.
John, Il’l see you on Tuesday.