World’s first dwarf giraffes spotted in Uganda and Namibia
Jan. 8, 2021 , 1:10 PM
Giraffes are known for their height, but the first two dwarf giraffes ever discovered one 2.8 meters tall and one 2.6 meters tall are bucking that trend,
The New York Times reports. The animals, found in national parks in Uganda and Namibia (above, right), were both diagnosed with skeletal dysplasia, a condition that affects bone growth, scientists reported last month in
BMC Research Notes. (You can watch a video of the Ugandan giraffe here.) This condition, rare in wildlife, significantly shortened the giraffes’ legs which they can’t use to run or kick effectively but it had no effect on their long necks.
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A Giraffe (Giraffa) is considered the tallest living terrestrial mammal in the world. On average, these magnificent beasts towers over all the other animals at an astonishing 18 feet in height. But recently, local wildlife scientists discovered two that are smaller than the usual size.
(Giraffe: Photo by Howling Red)
In Africa, scientists researching animal conservation organizations stumbled upon an Angolan (Gimil) and a Nubian (Nigel) Giraffe.
GCF researchers recently spotted two dwarf giraffe in Namibia and Uganda. These adult male giraffe are the first dwarf. Posted by Giraffe Conservation Foundation on Saturday, January 2, 2021
What made this a unique experience is that the Giraffes they found had less than half the average Giraffe s height. The latter measured to reach nine feet (9 ft), four inches (4 in), while the former was just eight and a half feet (8 and 1/2 ft).
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JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Being tall is the giraffe’s competitive advantage, giving it the pick of leaves from the tallest trees, so scientists were stunned to find two giraffe dwarves on different sides of Africa.
“It’s fascinating what our researchers out in the field found,” Julian Fennessy, co-founder of the Giraffe Conservation Foundation, told Reuters in a videocall on Friday. “We were very surprised.”
Most giraffes grow to 15 - 20 feet (4.5 - 6 metres), but in 2018, scientists working with the foundation discovered an 8 1/2-foot (2.6 metre) giraffe in Namibia. Three years earlier, they had also found a 9-foot 3-inch (2.8 metre) giraffe in a Ugandan wildlife park.
The second giraffe to be discovered with a similar condition was even shorter, at just 8½ feet. Called Nigel, the Angolan giraffe was discovered in 2018, on a private farm in Namibia.
This is the first time dwarfism has been observed in giraffes. And while the animals have survived into adulthood, a study published recently by the BMC Research Notes journal says that limited mobility caused by shorter leg dimension might make these giraffe more susceptible to predation, even in the subadult/adult life stages. Anecdotal video evidence of giraffe movement in Namibia suggest that this giraffe experience difficulty in movement, with a limping gait, the study continues of the condition, whose cause is unknown as of yet.
Scientists Discover Short-Legged Corgi Giraffes
Photo: Emma Wells, GCF
Being extremely tall is sort of a giraffe’s whole thing. So when scientists recently spotted two wild giraffes with relatively short legs nearly halving their adult height they were stunned.
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“The initial reaction was a bit of curious disbelief,” said Michael Brown, a conservation biologist with the Giraffe Conservation Foundation and the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute.
In 2015, Brown and his colleagues were conducting photographic surveys of the Nubian giraffes in Murchison Falls National Park, Uganda, monitoring the animals’ abundance and geographic distribution. Sometimes, said Brown, the team can see hundreds of giraffes in a single day.