JOHANNESBURG – Being big is the giraffe’s competitive advantage, allowing it to pick leaves from the tallest trees, so scientists were amazed to find two giraffe dwarfs on different sides of Africa.
“It’s fascinating what our researchers have found in the field,” Julian Fennessy, co-founder of the Giraffe Conservation Foundation, told Reuters in a video call Friday. “We were very surprised.”
Most giraffes grow to 4.5-6 meters in height, but in 2018 scientists working with the foundation discovered a 2.6-meter giraffe in Namibia. Three years earlier, they had also found a 2.8-meter (9-foot 3-inch) giraffe in a Ugandan wildlife park.
They published their findings in the British Medical Journal late last month.
In both cases, the giraffes had the standard long necks but short, stubby legs, the paper said. Skeletal dysplasia, the medical name for the condition, affects humans and domestic animals, but the paper said it was rare to see in wild animals.
Images taken by the foundation showed the Ugandan giraffe standing on thick, muscular legs in the dry savannah of Murchison Falls National Park in northern Uganda, while a larger animal with the usual long, stick-like legs walked behind it.
“Unfortunately, there is probably no benefit at all. Giraffes got bigger to get to the taller trees, ”Fennessy said. He added that it would most likely be physically impossible for them to breed with their full-size counterparts.
The number of tallest mammals in the world has declined by about 40% over the past 30 years to about 111,000, so all four species are classified as ‘vulnerable’ by conservationists.
“It’s mainly because of habitat loss, habitat fragmentation, growing human populations, and more land being cultivated,” said Fennessy. “Combined with a little bit of poaching, climate change.”
But conservation efforts have helped numbers start to recover over the past decade, he added.