The question of how organisms communicate with and locate one another has been a cornerstone of ecology for hundreds of years. Communication involves the exchange of information among individuals of the same or different species. It is obvious that communication plays an integral role in human society, where a miscommunication can lead to confusion, distrust, or disdain. This same concept is thought to be relevant among non-human animal societies. Animal communication mediates social relations, fosters interactions between and among species, and also facilitates fundamental behaviors such as mate choice, predator avoidance, foraging, among others. Communication is therefore crucial for animal survival and reproduction. As a consequence, several species of animals have developed novel ways of conveying vital information to each other. Animals can do so via sounds (e.g. dogs bark, lions roar, birds sing, but what does the fox say?), through visual displays (think peacocks), color change (e.g., in octopuses, chameleons, and cuttlefish), and others. Interestingly, when it comes to the communication of giraffes – one of the most fascinating species of African wildlife – we know precious little. No one can really say, for instance, how giraffes exchange information among each other. We do not even know how one giraffe finds another!
Rothschild’s giraffes in Murchison Falls National Park, Uganda. Photo – Herbert Kasozi How can this possibly be the case? How can we not know fundamental ecological facts about one of the world’s most interesting mammals? Well, giraffes have not, until recently, garnered much scientific attention at all. In fact, it was not until the 1970’s that it was observed that giraffes actually vocalize. Until that point, it was popular belief that giraffes were mute. Giraffe vocalizations, though quiet, have now been described as hums, snorts, growls, hisses, and bursts. Of course, in addition to vocalizations, giraffes might communicate with one another in via their senses of small or sight. Scientific research to date has only been successful at describing signals and sensory organs that are thought to be useful in giraffe communication. Current work has focused on describing the anatomy of giraffe eyes and visual capabilities, scent organs and chemical signals, and vocal range. Hardly any research however, has examined the intent, cause, and context of these communications. Given the marginal research on this topic, several outstanding questions relating to giraffe communication remain. For instance, giraffes maintain a fission-fusion social system. This is merely a complex way of saying that they variably live in large groups and small groups throughout a day and over time. Given that, we still do not know how giraffes maintain social cohesion, what inspires them to live in groups, and how they speak to each other.
No one really knows the mechanism with which this group of Rothschild’s giraffes mediates their social relations. Photo – Herbert Kasozi
These questions came at an opportune time for me given that they coincided with the start of my PhD in the Research on the Ecology of Carnivores and their Prey (RECaP) Laboratory at Michigan State University. To get a better understanding of what is known about how giraffes communicate, my advisor Dr. Robert Montgomery and I were inspired to conduct a review of existing literature on giraffe communication. In August of 2017, we conducted a thorough search of published literature (using the Web of Science, Scopus, Wildlife Studies Worldwide, and the Michigan State University library search engines) looking for studies referencing giraffe communication across visual, auditory, and olfactory dimensions. To our surprise, the initial search returned a meagre 10 studies. From these we could hardly extract comprehensive information on how giraffes exchange information among themselves.
We did not despair! We conducted another round of searches and doubled our total. Unbelievably, there have only been 21 studies published between 1958 and 2018 on the topic of giraffe communication. Furthermore, only five of these studies examined giraffe vocalizations. These found that giraffes produce infrasonic and audible vocalizations (i.e., hums, snorts, growls, hisses, bursts). The studies that focused on giraffe chemical and visual communication tended to investigate form and structure of the organs responsible for the production of these signals. These found substantive evidence that giraffes have acute visual and chemical senses. For example, giraffe eyes are the largest among land mammals and next to diurnal primates in visual acuity.
We have just published this review, entitled “How do giraffes locate one another? A review of visual, auditory, and olfactory communication among giraffes” in the Journal of Zoology. In this publication, we synthesize the published information on giraffe communication across visual, auditory and olfactory dimensions. We describe what is currently known of these dimensions and codify potential avenues for further giraffe communication research. Hopefully, this article will demonstrate to the scientific community how little we know of giraffe communication in the hopes that we can renew our efforts to learn more about the ecology of this majestic species.
We did not despair! We conducted another round of searches and doubled our total. Unbelievably, there have only been 21 studies published between 1958 and 2018 on the topic of giraffe communication. Furthermore, only five of these studies examined giraffe vocalizations. These found that giraffes produce infrasonic and audible vocalizations (i.e., hums, snorts, growls, hisses, bursts). The studies that focused on giraffe chemical and visual communication tended to investigate form and structure of the organs responsible for the production of these signals. These found substantive evidence that giraffes have acute visual and chemical senses. For example, giraffe eyes are the largest among land mammals and next to diurnal primates in visual acuity.
We have just published this review, entitled “How do giraffes locate one another? A review of visual, auditory, and olfactory communication among giraffes” in the Journal of Zoology. In this publication, we synthesize the published information on giraffe communication across visual, auditory and olfactory dimensions. We describe what is currently known of these dimensions and codify potential avenues for further giraffe communication research. Hopefully, this article will demonstrate to the scientific community how little we know of giraffe communication in the hopes that we can renew our efforts to learn more about the ecology of this majestic species.
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