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Giraffes

Giraffes, (biological name Giraffa camelopardalis), are the tallest animals on earth. Males grow up to 18 feet in height, females to about 14 feet. An adult giraffe weighs about 1,800 pounds. They live in the subsaharan grasslands of Africa. This paper will look at the mating customs and strategies, reproduction, and the parental and alloparental rearing of the offspring of giraffes.

Giraffes are individualistic in nature, and do not form cohesive herds or stable family units. Individuals wander from herd to herd, and herds take on a different makeup at different times. Changes occur daily in some herds as giraffes leave one group to join another. Herds may be made up of either females and their young of both sexes, young and mature males, a mixed group of males and females, or a family unit of a mature bull with females and their young (Lavine, p. 50; Mochi and MacClintock, p. 44). Mixed herds range in size from an association of a bull and a cow to a herd of fifteen bulls and cows of large and medium size. A herd may contain a single bull or as many as eight bulls in a mixed herd. Sometime a herd will be led by a female, but it is usually the largest bull in a mixed herd who is the dominant animal.

Male herds appear to be of three types: herds of large bulls; herds in which a large bull appears to have younger males in his care; and herds of males too old to be with their mothers, and too young to be accepted as adults in mixed herds. Older males and females tend to live alone, while bulls in the prime of their life wander far and wide in search of a mate, and wander from herd to herd. A giraffe's home range is estimated to be forty to fifty square miles (Mochi and MacClintock, p. 47).

Because the family unit as such does not exist among giraffes, and the giraffes in a particular region represent, in effect, an extended family, the issue of mate selection does not come into play. An old bull may object to a ...

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Giraffes. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 08:29, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1693129.html