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The female baby giraffe is the second born at Brights Zoo in Limestone this year, yet unlike its peers, is a solid brown color. Already standing at 6 feet tall, the zoo's vet team hasn't observed any health concerns related to the lack of pattern.
"She is very inquisitive," David Bright, the zoo's director, told Insider. "She stays very tight with her mom, doesn't wander off too far, but she's very curious what's going on around her. She has a very positive personality when it comes to giraffes."
Fred Bercovitch, a wildlife conservation biologist and professor who's been studying giraffes for over 20 years, told Insider that a brown spotless giraffe is extremely rare and "almost certainly due to a specific mutation."
Bright told Insider that the most recent known example of a brown spotless giraffe was born at a Tokyo zoo in 1972. Her name was Toshiko. And she had an older sibling, born several years prior, that was also brown and spotless, Bright said.
But Bright said he only knows of one other instance of a brown spotless giraffe, in Uganda. Stephanie Fennessy, executive director of the Giraffe Conservation Foundation, said her organization has never seen such a giraffe in the wild, and they work in 20 African countries.
Not much research has been done on giraffes, Bercovitch said, and very little is known about their spot patterns. But we do know that every giraffe has a unique spot pattern, and that there is likely "some amount of heritability between mothers and calves to the spot pattern," Bercovitch said.
Bercovitch said giraffes are highly visual creatures have a complex social system, and it's highly unlikely that the brown Tennessee giraffe will be ostracized from the community for her spotlessness.
Rafiki made fewer public appearances at our giraffe feeding platform these last few years, largely due to his arthritis. Needless to say, he relished his one-on-one time with his keepers in the Africa barn when not on habitat. To keep him comfortable, our animal care team ensured Rafiki had regular hoof trims, chiropractic sessions, acupuncture, laser therapy, medication. He recently received a pair of shoes for his feet last week. Recently he began losing his appetite and we started hospice care, which included an increase in pain medication to keep him comfortable and daily quality of life assessments.
Rafiki was one of our first giraffe to participate in voluntary hoof trims and other care, contributing to how our Zoo cares for giraffes, Alyssa said. He helped our animal care team learn new skills to provide supportive care for older giraffes and preventative care for our younger ones.
The giraffe is an iconic African mammal known for its long neck and legs. They are the tallest land animals in the world, standing up to 18 feet tall. Giraffes are herbivores and mainly feed on leaves and buds of trees, using their long necks to reach high branches. They live in savannas and open woodlands in Africa and are social animals that live in herds. Male giraffes, known as bulls, engage in necking, a behavior where they swing their necks and hit each other with their horns in order to establish dominance. Giraffes are also known for their distinctive spotted pattern, which helps to camouflage them in their natural environment.
Giraffe have learnt to deal with this difficulty in various ways. Their need for water is reduced by the fact that they are able to obtain almost all they need from the plants they eat. An adult giraffe will only need to drink water once a day. Giraffe do not sweat or pant like many other mammals, their body temperature fluctuates according to the surrounding temperatures this allows them to conserve water.
A sparring match between two adult male giraffes called necking. The giraffe swinging his neck into the knee of the other one is two or three feet taller than the one taking the brunt of the jab. Unlike a battle between two males for the right to breed with a female which could end in serious injury, this is a lighter fight for dominance between the two males.
The reticulated giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis reticulata), also known as the Somali giraffe, is a subspecies of giraffe native to Somalia, southern Ethiopia, and northern Kenya. Reticulated giraffes can interbreed with other giraffe subspecies in captivity or if they come into contact with populations of other subspecies in the wild.
The reticulated giraffe is among the most well-known of the nine giraffe subspecies. Together with the Rothschild giraffe, it is by far the giraffe most commonly seen in zoos. Its coat consists of large, polygonal, liver-colored spots outlined by a network of bright-white lines. The blocks may sometimes appear deep red and may also cover the legs. The extraordinary height of giraffes is attributed to a ritual known as "necking", where two males fight for reproduction rights by slamming their necks into one another. The giraffes with the tallest and strongest necks are victorious and allowed to reproduce, thus passing these genes on to future generations.
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Zoo guests have a unique opportunity to interact with our Masai giraffe family at the Giraffe Feeding Platform. Our giraffes are among the most beloved at the Houston Zoo for their charm and curiosity about their visitors! Make your way up the ramp to the shaded feeding area for a view of the giraffes and ostriches while you offer a crunchy lettuce leaf snack to your new long-necked pals.
Exactly three years after the killing of Cecil the lion sparked outrage among the American public, one more U.S. trophy hunter is making international headlines for killing an imperiled animal -- this time a giraffe. The news of this hunt comes just weeks after another American killed a lion, alleged to be Skye, a male dominant lion, also in South Africa.
Last year the Humane Society of the United States, Humane Society International and our conservation partners petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to list the giraffe as endangered under the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA). If the government moves forward with protections under the ESA, the import, export and interstate sale of giraffe parts would be prohibited in the United States. An ESA listing would also mandate the FWS to demonstrate that the import of giraffe hunting trophies would enhance the survival of the species -- a tall order given the precarious status the species is in.
The American hunter who killed the giraffe is pushing back against the criticism, arguing that the animal she hunted was more than 18 years old and that he had killed three other giraffes. But that argument makes no sense from a conservation perspective. Giraffes have a breeding life span of about 18 years, and bulls are able reproduce right up until their last years. In the wild, displays of dominance determine who will breed, and among giraffes, dominance is achieved through necking behavior which is a critical component of natural selection as it ensures that only the strongest, fittest males will reproduce. If the giraffe killed by this hunter indeed killed three other giraffes, then she just wiped out the strongest and fittest individual from that population, weakening the gene pool.
Image recognition algorithms are trained on a variety of images from around the internet, and/or on a few standard image datasets. But there likely haven't been any spotless giraffes in their training data, since the last one to be born was probably in 1972 in Tokyo. How do they do when faced with photos of the spotless giraffe?
One model I tried was Multi-Modal In-Context Learning (MMICL). I tried simulating a back-and-forth exchange a la Visual Chatbot but it quickly got repetitive (see conversation above). When I tried one-off questions it answered more coherently but also failed to note the giraffe's spotlessness.
Giraffes have been a cautionary meme in image recognition, with early algorithms especially prone to reporting giraffes in places where there are none. Giraffe With No Spots is another example of how AI can miss the obvious.
The animals were loaded onto the S.S. Robin Goodfellow in Mombasa, British East Africa (present-day Kenya), for a 52-day, 3,200-mile journey to the coast of New York. In normal conditions this would be a rough trip, especially for temperature-sensitive giraffes, which were placed in crates and forced to endure whatever the high seas threw at them. Little did anyone now that in September 1938, during the final few days of their trip, these animals bound for San Diego would encounter what was then the most devastating hurricane to hit the upper East Coast, killing nearly 700 people. (And New York would not experience one as destructive until Hurricane Sandy in 2012.) The 130-foot storm-ravaged cargo ship finally reached soggy and mangled Brooklyn on September 23.
What happened on that ship during the storm is almost too crazy to be true. Imagine waves so severe that a rhino is tossed overboard. Along with the rhino, the food for the giraffes was lost as well. The crate containing the female giraffe rolled and rolled until it shattered to pieces. She was presumed dead while every precaution was taken to protect the male. Amazingly, one of the crew saw the female giraffe move, so they covered and protected her as the storm raged on. When the storm finally abated they tried to get her out of what was left of her crate, but they were not successful. After three days of being fed pancakes (and the giraffes are indeed fed pancakes at one point in the novel), she mustered up the energy to pull herself up. However, as soon as she was upright the crew could see that her left rear ankle was severely injured.
I had read about the true story of the famous hurricane giraffes when I conducted research for my story on Belle Benchley, but I thank Lynda Rutledge for writing this work of fiction, which left me with the desire to learn more about them. I refuse to give out any spoilers about the novel, but I encourage you to pick it up. Perhaps you will fall in love with those giraffes and enjoy the adventures of Old Man and Woody as much as I did.
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