by Finding love can be difficult. But when you are lamenting your own love difficulties, think of the giraffe. Giraffes don’t go into heat like cats or dogs, they don’t have a mating season, they don’t make mating calls, and they don’t give visual cues that they’re ready to mate. So how do giraffes find mates?
It’s kind of gross, but this is how baby giraffes are made: A male giraffe – called a bull – pokes a nearby female giraffe – a cow – and sniffs her genitals. Sometimes he has to poke her a few times, but eventually the female giraffe widens her posture and urinates for about five seconds into the male giraffe’s mouth.
The male giraffe then performs what is known as a “Flehmen response”, curling its upper lip back, showing its teeth, and breathing with its nostrils closed for several seconds. (The name comes from a German word for showing teeth.) The flehmen response is also used by animals such as horses and goats to transfer scents to the vomeronasal organ above the roof of the mouth, a very sensitive component of smell.
animal attraction
Humans don’t make flehmen; but animals do this when they want to smell something that interests them. In the case of an excited male giraffe, he hopes that the chemicals he detects in the female’s urine — called pheromones, which can trigger a social response in some animals — will signal that she is in heat, or fertile and ready to mate.
When a male giraffe doesn’t smell the right chemical signal in his urine, he leaves that female alone and moves on to another. But while most animals wait until the urine is on the ground before sniffing it, the giraffe is too tall to do that. Lynnette Hart (opens in new tab)a professor at the University of California Davis School of Veterinary Medicine told Live Science.
Hart is lead author of a new study on giraffe behavior published in the journal animals (opens in new tab). The co-author is her husband Benjamin Hart (opens in new tab)emeritus professor at the same veterinary school, and observed these and other behaviors among giraffes during field trips to the Etosha National Park (opens in new tab) in Namibia, in southwest Africa.
The Harts managed to get especially close to dozens of giraffes gathered near watering holes in the park; giraffes can often only be seen from a distance and will flee when approached, Lynette Hart said. “That was really unique, being up close.”
giraffe sex
Finding mates can be a lot of work for male giraffes. The Harts observed bull giraffes approaching cow giraffes about 150 times, but only saw them once when the approach led to consummation. Once all these steps have taken place, giraffes mate in the manner of most mammals, with the bull riding the cow. Sex is done at a precarious height above the ground and lasts only a few seconds.
If she becomes pregnant, the female giraffe will gestate for 400 days before giving birth standing up, so that her baby giraffe will be well-developed enough to stand and walk when she is born.
