JOHANNESBURG – Being tall is the giraffe’s competitive advantage, giving it a selection of leaves from the tallest trees, so scientists were amazed to find two giraffe dwarfs in different parts of Africa.
“It’s fascinating what our researchers have discovered in the field,” Julian Fennessy, co-founder of the Giraffe Conservation Foundation, told Reuters on Friday. “We were very surprised.”
Most giraffes grow to 4.5-6 meters (15-20 feet), but in 2018, scientists working with the foundation discovered an 8 1/2 foot (2.6 meters) giraffe in Namibia. Three years earlier, they had also found a 9-foot (2.8-meter) 9-foot giraffe in a wild park in Uganda.
They published their findings in the British Medical Journal late last month.
In both cases, the giraffes had standard long necks, but short legs and stems, the newspaper said. Skeletal dysplasia, the medical name of the condition, affects humans and domesticated animals, but the newspaper said it is rare to see wild animals.
The footage of the foundation showed the Ugandan giraffe sitting on thick, muscular legs in the dry savannah of Murchison Falls National Park in northern Uganda, while a taller, long, cane-like animal walked behind it.
“It simply came to our notice then. Giraffes have grown to reach taller trees, ”said Fennessy. He added that it would most likely be physically impossible to reproduce with their normal-sized counterparts.
The number of the world’s tallest mammals has dropped by about 40% in the last 30 years to about 111,000, so all four species are classified by conservatives as “vulnerable.”
“It’s mainly due to habitat loss, habitat fragmentation, human population growth, more land growth,” Fennessy said. “Combined with a little poaching, climate change.”
But conservation efforts have helped the numbers recover over the past decade, he added.