No, it isn’t four separate animal species that make up one singular giraffe, don’t be a bloody nonsense.

Instead, after a little digging into giraffe genetics, scientists have found that there are four separate species.

Giraffes had previously been classified as a single species, divided into four sub-species, but some DNA analysis shows that ‘four groups of giraffes have not cross-bred and exchanged genetic material for millions of years’.

Just read through it slowly again, it all makes sense. Here’s the BBC:

The study published in the journal Current Biology has rewritten the biology of Earth’s tallest mammal…

Conservation was the catalyst for this genetic research; the Giraffe Conservation Foundation asked the team to carry out genetic analysis of giraffes in Namibia.

The foundation wanted to understand the genetic differences between different giraffe populations, to see how the animals might be affected if different subspecies were mixed together when animals were moved into protected areas.

What we found then, says Axel Janke, a geneticist at the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre, who led the research, “was that the sub-species were genetically very different and separate.

“I’d never seen that in a population study [of a species] before.”

Sounds like giraffes need to get off their high horses and mingle a little more, elitist knobs.

Those four species then:

• southern giraffe (Giraffa giraffa),
• Masai giraffe (G. tippelskirchi) [pictured below]
• reticulated giraffe (G. reticulata)
• northern giraffe (G. camelopardalis), which includes the Nubian giraffe (G. c. camelopardalis) as a distinct but related subspecies.

Memorise those names, then prepare to blow the socks off the tourists flocking to our shores over December and January. We’ll end with a sombre reminder:

In the last 15 years, the population of giraffes has declined by 40% – there are now an estimated 90,000 individuals in the wild. But, as a single species, they are classified by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature as of Least Concern.

Now, it is clear that each of these four newly classified species could be faring very differently.

It’s important to raise awareness for conservation, said Dr Janke, “to protect his beautiful animal of which we know so little.”

The humble giraffe hey, four more reasons to love this continent we call home.

[source:bbc]