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 female

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ull usually persists. A bull may have to follows a cow for hours before successfully mating with her. The actual mating is brief, but is repeated a number of times within a period of several hours. Occasionally, an older bull will chase off a younger one who is trying to mate with a cow in his group (Mochi and MacClintock, p. 79-80). Although there is little competition among young bulls for cow's in heat, because of the loose structure of giraffe herds, males do enter into head-slamming matches to establish hierarchy, or ranking order, of physical and sexual dominance, and serious battles are avoided (Mochi and MacClintock, p. 72). Giraffes use their neck to express emotions. In the normal position, the angle of the neck is usually 50 to 60 degrees to the ground. In anger, the head is lowered almost to the horizontal position, which signals a threat. To express submission, a giraffe stretches its neck and raises its nose in the air. Before calving, a cow usually finds a sheltered spot. During the birth, the cow stands erect, and the baby, usually six feet tall, and weighing 150 pounds, drops five to five and a half feet to the ground (Lavine, p. 58). The drop breaks the umbilical cord. The baby is usually not hur

Category: Misc - G