Durban - The population of the world’s tallest animal species, the giraffe, is shrinking fast.
In just 15 years, numbers have plummeted by more than 40 percent.
The Giraffe Conservation Foundation says there were 140 000 of these iconic animals spread across Africa at the turn of the 20th century.
Now there are just 80 000 left.
“This is an alarming trend, which continues to go largely unnoticed by the wider public, including well-versed conservationists,” the foundation warns.The giraffe’s only living cousin, the elusive okapi, is in an even worse state.
Restricted to the rain forests of a single country, the world population of okapis in the wild has dropped by almost 50 percent in the past two decades largely due to civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Writing in the latest special issue of the African Journal of Ecology, giraffe and okapi experts reported that neither species was considered seriously threatened until fairly recently.
However, giraffes have become extinct in seven African countries in the past 30 years (Nigeria, Malawi, Mali, Burkina Faso, Eritrea, Guinea and Mauretania). Ethiopia had almost 2 000 giraffe in the 1970s. Today just 270 are left.
One of the biggest concerns is that there are nine official sub-species of giraffe.
Two of these sub-species have been particularly hard-hit, with the total number of Nubian giraffes down to less than 650, and the West African sub-species down to just 300.
Giraffe and okapi researchers Noëlle Kümpel, Sophie Grange and Julian Fennessy say there is still a paucity of information about these two emblematic species, at a time when giraffe appear to have slipped underneath the conservation radar.
Far more attention was still focused on elephant, rhino, big cats and great apes, and these species were likely to continue to attract a disproportionate amount of conservation attention and funding.
The Giraffe Conservation Society, set up in 2009, suggests that the degradation and fragmentation of former living spaces – accompanied by rapidly expanding human populations – is one of the main reasons giraffe numbers have declined so fast in the past few decades.
Giraffe habitat is degraded or destroyed by farmers and cattle herders, while war, civil unrest and the bush meat trade have added to the pressure.
As they are pushed into smaller living spaces, giraffe were becoming increasingly isolated and could become vulnerable to in-breeding.
Fred Bercovitch and Francois Deacon, two giraffid experts who are trying to improve scientific knowledge about the tallest creatures on the planet, say very little is known about the social dynamics of giraffes.
No clue
“We have no clue as to how giraffe decide to join a herd, remain in a herd, leave a herd, follow a herd or stay behind when a herd wanders away,” they say, although older males were more likely to be solitary.
Very little is known about how they communicate with one another.
They emit very few audible vocal sounds other than snorting and sneezing, leading some researchers to believe that giraffes spend a great deal of time watching and monitoring the behaviour of other giraffes to avoid predators such as lion and hyena.
Some scientists also suggest that, like elephants, giraffes may communicate using infrasound – a sound wavelength below the range of human hearing.
Meredith Bashaw, who studied captive giraffes in the San Diego Wild Animal Park, has suggested that the peculiar neck-stretching behaviour of giraffe cows may indicate that they use infrasound to communicate with their calves.
Other research groups have suggested that female giraffes in oestrous may also use infrasound to attract males from great distances.
Later this week several researchers from across the world are meeting in Hoedspruit, Limpopo province, to discuss better ways to protect giraffe and okapi.
These include captive breeding in zoos across the world and possibly trophy-hunting in some countries.
Among the researchers is Bloemfontein-based researcher Francois Deacon, who says wildlife managers across Africa will have to work more closely with each other as giraffes get squeezed into smaller living spaces in most parts of the continent.
“We need to start thinking out of the box, as this time around, saving giraffes from extinction might just be our last chance to get it right.”
The Mercury