9 Feb. () –
A study from the University of California Davis provides new data on the unique sexual life of giraffes, their reproductive behavior and how their anatomy favors that behavior.
They do not have a fixed mating season. They don’t go into heatlike dogs or cats. They do not make mating calls or give visual signals of sexual readiness. So how does a male giraffe know that his advances will be well received? Simply put: pee, pheromones, and a gentle nudge.
The study, published in Animals magazine, describes how male giraffes test the sexual receptivity of females.
First, males provoke females to urinate by nudging them and sniffing at their genitals.. If the female is receptive, she widens her posture and urinates from her for about 5 seconds while the male takes the urine into his mouth. He then curls his lip and inhales with his mouth open, an act called flehmen that carries the female’s scent and pheromones from her oral cavity to her vomeronasal organ.
The study provides the most precise understanding yet of how flehmen is produced with the anatomy of giraffes. Although flehmen is common among many animals, including horses and cats, most mammals wait until the urine is on the ground to investigate. The giraffe, however, is not made for such explorations.
“They don’t risk reaching the ground due to the extreme development of their head and neck,” he explains. it’s a statement Lynette Hart, lead author and professor of Population and Reproductive Health at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. “So they have to push the female by telling her: ‘Please pee now’. And often it does. You have to get their cooperation. If not, he’ll know that he has no future with her.”
Hart and her co-author and husband Benjamin Hart, a professor emeritus at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, witnessed this behavior on several research trips to Etosha National Park in Namibia.
In the western part of the park there were large watering holes where dozens of giraffes congregated. Lynette defined it as “a dream come true” to watch giraffes. “You often see a few in the distance, but not up close,” she says.
Benjamin had studied how giraffe behavior worked within the anatomy of other animals, including goats. During their travels to East Africa, the Harts suspected that a similar process was taking place in giraffes.
“It’s part of their reproductive behavior,” says Benjamin Hart. This helps us better understand what giraffes do when they accumulate around a water hole.” People love to see giraffes. I think the more the public knows about them, the more interested they will be in their conservation.”
