Being more gregarious might mean added support and less stress
Grown-up giraffes just aren’t huggy, cuddling, demonstrative animals. So it took identity-recognition software grinding through five years of data to reveal that female social life matters to survival.The more gregarious adult female giraffes in northern Tanzania’s Tarangire ecosystem tend to live longer, concludes wildlife biologist Monica Bond of the University of Zurich.
In published science, the idea that giraffes even have social lives isn’t much more than a decade old, Bond says. (For the time being, Bond still treats giraffes as one species, Giraffa camelopardalis, until there’s more agreement on how many species there are.) Adult males spend most of their time in solitary searches for females willing to mate, but females often hang around in groups.
Compared with bats clustering under a bridge or baboons grooming pals’ fur, even the most sociable female giraffes often look as if they just happen to be milling around feeding in the same shrubbery. These “loose” groups, as Bond describes them, don’t snuggle or groom each other. A group mostly just browses in the same vicinity, then may fray apart and reconfigure with different members in the fission-fusion pattern seen in many animals, such as dolphins. Yet closer looks have found that females, in their low-drama way, prefer certain neighbors and seem to avoid certain others.
