JOHANNESBURG – Being tall is the giraffe’s competitive advantage, giving it the choice of leaves from the tallest trees, so scientists were surprised to find two dwarf giraffes on different sides of Africa.
“It is fascinating what our researchers have discovered in the field,” Julian Fennessy, co-founder of the Giraffe Conservation Foundation, told Reuters in a video call on Friday. “We were very surprised.”
Most giraffes grow to 15-20 feet (4.5-6 meters), but in 2018, scientists working with the foundation discovered an 8 1/2 foot (2.6 meter) giraffe in Namibia. Three years earlier, they also found a 2.8-meter-long giraffe in a Uganda wildlife park.
They published their findings in the British Medical Journal late last month.
In both cases, the giraffes had a standard long neck, but stubby, short legs, the newspaper said. Skeletal dysplasia, the medical name of the disease, affects humans and pets, but the newspaper said it is rare to see it 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 taller animal with its usual long, stick-like legs walked behind it.
“Unfortunately, there is probably no benefit at all. Giraffes have grown taller to reach the tallest trees, ”said Fennessy. He added that it would probably be physically impossible for them to mate with their normal-sized counterparts.
The number of the highest mammal in the world has decreased by 40% in the last 30 years, to about 111,000, so all four species are classified by conservationists as ‘vulnerable’.
“It is mainly due to habitat loss, habitat fragmentation, growth in human populations, more land being cultivated,” said Fennessy. “Combined with a little poaching, climate change.”
But conservation efforts have helped numbers to begin to recover in the past decade, he added.