This speedy creature is the second fastest land animal on Earth after the cheetah.
Its often confused with an antelope, has enormous horns – or are they antlers? And its ancestors
went head to head with some of the greatest hunters of the pleistocene. This is the pronghorn.
Hi, I’m Danielle Dufault and you’re watching Animalogic. Today, we’re in the beautiful
Grasslands National Park in Saskatchewan, Canada, home to wide open plains, a sea of natural
grasses, and an incredible creature we’ll be lucky to see – that is, if we can catch up with it!
Despite its scientific name “Antilocapra Americana” translating to the “American
Antelope Goat”, pronghorns are not a part of the antelope or goat family. In fact,
their closest living relatives are the giraffe and the okapi.
They go by many names, pronghorn antelope, prongbuck, and American Antelope. But if
we really want to understand these high-speed hunnies, we have to start at the very beginning.
Pronghorns are the sole surviving species of a once-flourishing North
American ungulate family called the Antilocapridae, with fossil records
dating back to the Miocene Epoch, more than 5 million years ago.
During its history, the Antilocapridae family has included a wide array of diverse species
which has had an equally diverse variety of horns. The pronghorn’s incredible agility
and super speed evolved during a time when they shared the North American grasslands with some
of the continent’s greatest predators. There was the long-legged hyena, a large lion, and
at least two species of cheetah. Pronghorns had to outrun these animals in order to stay alive.
Even though their speedy, prehistoric predators became extinct in North
America about 10,000 years ago during the Pleistocene extinction event,
the pronghorn’s magnificent running ability has not changed a bit.
They can canter effortlessly at 40 km an hour, gallop without straining at 70 km an hour,
and can reach top speeds of up to 100 km an hour. This makes them the fastest land animal
in North America and the second fastest in the world. Only the cheetah is faster.
For these guys, speed is not just a way to escape predators, it’s a way of life.
Pronghorns have really long and skinny legs that are built for big strides. They also
have an absolutely extraordinary capacity to consume and process oxygen, relying on
their big hearts and lungs to help bring more oxygen to their muscles. They also
run with their mouths open to take in maximum oxygen to fuel their muscles.
This allows them to run at a sustained 70 km per hour for over 30 kilometers. African cheetahs,
for comparison's sake, can only hold their top speed for about 1 kilometer.
Pronghorns are masters of both the marathon and
the sprint. They can actually run a whopping 11km in 10 minutes, While I
can run an impressive 1km in 5 minutes. In good weather. With the right shoes.
No current predator can outrun a healthy adult pronghorn. But it seems to me like no one has
told the pronghorns this fact because they have oh so many evolutionary features in order to keep
one step ahead of predators anyways. Pronghorns have huge protruding eyes
that are way back on their heads, giving them a wide field of vision.
How big are their eyes you ask? They have the largest eyes of any North American ungulate in
relation to their body size, with each eyeball measuring in at about 3.5 cm in diameter.
They have impeccable vision with the ability to spot a predator up to five to six km away.
Okay, pronghorns we get it, your eyes are incredible. (Danielle adjusting her own glasses)
Show-offs. (Alt line: While I, on the other hand,
have the ability to spot my producer up to 100m away, right Dylan? Oh sorry, that was Andres.)
Pronghorns have incredibly interesting horns – as they should,
because it's where their namesake originates.
But the question is, are they really horns or are
they antlers? It’s actually a cross between them both!
True antlers are made of bone and shed each year, while true horns are made of compressed keratin
and never shed. But the horns of the pronghorn are made of keratin but they shed them yearly.
In fact, they are the only animal in the world that have forked, or pronged,
horns that shed every year. Both male and female pronghorns have horns.
The male’s horns can grow to be up to 30 cm extending straight up then curving backwards,
but the female’s horns are much smaller. At the front of the horn is a small notch or prong,
and thus the pronghorn name was born! Alt: the tops of the horns bifurcate
into prongs, and thus the pronghorn name was born!
Pronghorns have short, reddish-brown fur that
helps them blend in well with the dry landscape that they live in.
They also have white patches of fur on their cheeks, chest, belly, rump and legs. This white
fur serves a greater purpose – you guessed it, to help warn their brethren of predators!
If a pronghorn sees a predator, the white fur on its backside stands
up. This sends a message to other pronghorns warning them of danger.
This white patch also serves as a beacon so the herd can stick together while fleeing. Their white
underbelly deflects heat rising from the ground and keeps the pronghorn nice and cool. They have
an outer layer of hairs to help them stay warm in the winter, but they molt that coat in the summer.
Scent communication is another way pronghorns warn
others of danger. Bucks actually have nine scent glands while does have six.
The glands on their rump release an alarm odor whenever the pronghorn sees a predator.
Sure, adult pronghorns may not need to fear as many predators today, but their fawns do,
making these evolutionary adaptations very important.
Wolves, foxes, bobcats, and especially coyotes
are known to hunt baby Pronghorns. And the pronghorn herds take this threat seriously.
In fact, another evolutionary adaptation is that females have an invariant litter
size of two - based on historically high levels of predation on fawns.
Pronghorns
mate in the summer and fall, and females give birth to one or two fawns in the early spring.
They have a longer gestation period than typical North American ungulates, averaging eight months.
When they are born, fawns are almost odorless to protect them from who? Oh that’s right. Coyotes!
Fawns can typically walk 30 minutes after birth. At four days old they can outrun
humans and in one week, they are able to run faster than a horse!
Pronghorn moms are neat freaks and keep their babies dry and clean. Immediately after birth,
the mom licks the fawn dry. Then, it proceeds to clean its rump.
Rump licking happens around an hour after birth. It helps prevent parasitic infections. Once the
fawn is fully dry and fetal feces-free, it’ll be ready to travel with its mom.
Pronghorns live in herds that vary in size depending on the season. In the fall and winter,
pronghorns can be found in herds of up to 1,000 individuals, but in the
spring and summer these herds break into smaller groupings.
There is a clear hierarchical structure to the groups with
social status being tied to size and dominance.
Male pronghorns will strike with their hooves or use their horns against predators and other
pronghorns alike, when battling for dominance. Fighting between males can
become very heated. In other words, if you mess with prong, you get the horn!
Despite their aggressive behavior, pronghorns are high-key herbivores who love to graze. They
are most active at dawn and dusk, munching on a variety of grasses and small plants.
They drink water when it’s available to them,
but they can go for weeks without it, getting their moisture from their food.
Pronghorns are ruminants, and spend their days and nights eating and resting with the herd.
But I say rest in the lightest sense of the word. Pronghorns rarely close their
eyes to sleep as they must remain alert for any potential predators.
When they do sleep it’s for less than 10 minutes at a time. This
might seem like an overabundance of caution in a land without cheetahs,
but with wolves and coyotes still around, pronghorns can’t be caught napping.
Pronghorns figure prominently into the early history of humans in North America. Forget where
the deer and the antelope play, North America has always been where the pronghorns play.
They were known to be used as sources of meat and hides
for the Indigenous population. Early European travelers to America’s West
wrote stories of pronghorn herds dotting the plains as far as the eyes could see.
But the more people that arrived, the more the pronghorn’s habitat declined, resulting
in only about 13,000 pronghorn left by 1920.
Populations began to recover with modern conservation and by the 1970s,
pronghorn numbers were up and there were over 400,000 in North America.
Today, here in Grasslands National Park, a process
is underway to reestablish the wild prairies and ensure pronghorn numbers continue to rise.
Of the five pronghorn subspecies, the Wyoming pronghorn, the Oregon pronghorn,
the Mexican pronghorn, the peninsular pronghorn, and the Sonoran pronghorn, only
the peninsular pronghorn of Baja California is at critical risk
(though the Sonoran longhorn is on the endangered species list).
These creatures can be found roaming the great plains of North America into
northern Mexico. In Canada, they reside here in Saskatchewan and in southeastern Alberta.
Their roaming is no joke. To meet their nutritional requirements they have to
travel vast distances. pronghorns have one of the longest land migrations in the Americas.
Herds of pronghorn migrate at least 240km between Wyoming’s Upper Green River Base and Grand Teton
National Park. The only animal to travel further in North America is the caribou.
Is there anything pronghorns can’t do?! In fact, there is! Pronghorns can’t
jump – that is to say they are very poor vertical jumpers and are overly reluctant to do so.
They rarely jump over fences and usually try to crawl under
them instead. This is important for a species that roams far and
wide through developed areas of the Great Plains where farmers have put up fences.
It has actually been observed that pronghorn have
the ability to remember the locations of fences, and will not pass through a fence
they have learned about in the past, even if the fencing is removed and only the posts remain.
The pronghorn is one animal that really shows how much our past shapes our future.
Let me know what we should talk about next in the comments and make sure you
subscribe for new episodes every week. Thanks for watching. See ya next time!