Giraffes are as socially complex as elephants | Hacker News Reader

Giraffes are as socially complex as elephants

edition.cnn.com

278 pointsTomte92 comments

Actual study: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/mam.12268

This brings me back to the time I was in Kenya: seeing Giraffes in the wild was one of the most enchanting experiences I have had in nature.

I was walking in one of the national parks, and we happened upon a young one in a clearing. When we got a little closer, the rest of the group emerged, their necks rising above the trees in front of us. The whole group galloped past us, with a motion almost like they were in slow motion or underwater with the way they float on top of their long limbs.

It was really different from seeing them standing in a zoo.

> in a zoo

I saw one at (I think) Disney Animal Kingdom. It seemed to be curious because it peeked into the vehicle. I was absolutely astonished at how huge the head was. They look so tiny up in the air. It was like seeing a traffic light at eye level for the first time.

> I was absolutely astonished at how huge the head was. They look so tiny up in the air.

A more accessible example of this effect is that your foot, heel to toe, is about the same length as your forearm, elbow to wrist.

People have real trouble believing this because your foot is always farther away than your arm is.

Who else just raised their foot to their forearm to compare? I can now verify that you are correct.

I did, and he isn't in my case.

Not even close. My arm is about 3 inches longer than my foot.

In which direction was it off? For me it was about perfect

I raised my foot so my heel was data against my elbow and my toes are a good 3-4 inches from my wrist

...or to look at your dick from above then closer up

The Nashville Zoo has a station where you go up on a platform and feed the giraffes lettuce. The heads are huge, the tongues are amazingly long and agile, and the slobber is nearly Great Dane grade.

Very cool thing, they charge $5 for the lettuce but its worth it. I'd pay more than that to be licked by a giraffe.

That is so cool. I remember seeing the giraffes at the San Diego Wild Animal Park at near head level, and they really are something up close. Didn't get to feed them, though!

I know the feeling. I've seen giraffes one time up close at a zoo. We were up on a raised platform about level with the giraffe's shoulders, it lowered its head down to look at us, I swear its eye wasn't much smaller than my head. I never expected them to be so big. They're gigantic. Like the size I used to picture things like brontosaurus and stuff. It gave me a whole new appreciation for that scale where they show a giraffe next to a brontosaurus. It made me realize I have no concept of how big they really must have been.

Yeah I lived in Kenya. Giraffes are highly intelligent and develop a friendly relationship with humans - at least the ones that feed them.

There are some parks where you could feed them up close. Not quite sure if they are as friendly in the wild though.

Some of them have strong and funny personalities. I was at an animal rescue place in harare, zimbabwe. Not many tourists go there and they thought I was crazy for being there, alone.

Anyways, it was evening and getting dark. They served food and I was sitting there alone eating my food. When suddenly, one of the giraffes snuck up behind me and licked the side of my face! I turned and saw it very close to me and it scared the living hell out of me.

I think he was being a pig and wanted my food but it was pretty funny.

Later in the evening he was bugging one of the families and wanted food. This huge animal was basically like a giant dog.

Sadly, some people take on African animals as pets. Then they get old and give them up. Then they go to the rescue center.

The wildebeest also was confused and thought he was a family dog.

In interesting giraffe facts, eye size seems related to eyesight (little animals with little eyes actually can't see well), and giraffes have gigantic eyes, 10x the volume of human eyes. They are known to be able to see a human move a mile away. Other animals watch giraffe to get signals about nearby predators.

Good references are hard to find, but here's a weird article that seems auto generated but also kind of useful...? https://sciencing.com/information-giraffe-eyes-8665464.html

> they are known to be able to see a human move a mile away

I don't doubt that Giraffes have good eyesight, but being able to see a human move a mile away doesn't seem like a particularly difficult feat. A human could also do that with a clear line of sight.

Really? I once had 20/10 vision as measured on my dad's eye chart (he was an MD), and I'm not sure I could always see a human moving at that distance if they were roughly the same color as the backdrop (which is, I think, a fair guess of the giraffe statistic).

Although that seems to make sense, eagles, and most birds of prey generally have smaller eyes than humans and yet they seem to have excellent sight too? Easily 20/5 vision from what I remember for bald eagles.

Yeah, I've pondered that too. My unfounded guess is that it's that they have very good foveated vision, essentially putting all their resolution into that center region.

And to be sure I'm also unclear on the optics. I think there are real physical limitations in small eyes, but presumably there are diminishing returns, and there's more than optics that define the quality of vision.

> Other animals watch giraffe to get signals about nearby predators

“Chill, giraffe seems happy"

Must be a good life when everybody around you is always keen on joining your good moods

While I was visiting Botswana, I observed a group of young giraffes clearly playing tag with each other. After that, I had no doubt they're pretty socially intelligent creatures.

From the actual article: “Until 2000, giraffe were believed to have no social structure (Innis 1958, Foster & Dagg 1972, Dagg & Foster 1976, Leuthold 1979), largely because of the daily fluidity in their group composition (Foster & Dagg 1972, Pratt & Anderson 1982, Pellew 1984a, Pratt & Anderson 1985).”

That was quite interesting reasoning because applying that to humans would seem silly. A fair number of people when observed by a distant third party, such as bachelor salesmen, solo travel bloggers, single real estate agents, etc., have little to no social structure because of the daily fluidity in their group composition.

For the giraffe researchers to have actually believed that seems like an instance of anti-anthropomorphism, that another mammal in this case must operate in totally alien ways.

There is a commonly-held - though contentious, if not outright fallacious - notion that environmental conditions in Europe helped to shape complex society there. On that same token, between African primates, elephants, and giraffes, one has to wonder if there's something about the African forests and savannah that encouraged the development of complex social arrangements (and the intelligence involved in maintaining them).

If you're in the Bay Area and interested in an up close encounter with a giraffe, I recommend https://www.safariwest.com/ .

(Disclaimer: no affiliation, I just enjoyed my visits there. I also have done no research into whether the animals are mistreated or anything.)

This looks interesting, hadn't heard of it before - thanks!

Also in the Bay Area, I was able to feed a giraffe at the San Francisco Zoo, which was super exciting! Their tongues are really impressive, would recommend feeding a giraffe at some point.

It was a few years ago, but at least back then they had specific times listed online when you could watch the giraffes get fed. The key was to show up at a low traffic time to get a chance to interact.

> "The most surprising thing for me is that it has taken until 2021 to recognize that giraffes have a complex social system. We have known for decades about other species of socially complex mammal, such as elephants, primates and cetaceans, but it is baffling to me how such a charismatic and well-known species as the giraffe could have been so understudied until recently,"

If giraffes have been understudied until recently, this casts discredit on what has been the prevailing "wisdom":

> Once perceived as humble creatures that focused solely on feeding their majestic bodies, one book from 1991 described the giraffe as "socially aloof, forming no lasting bonds with its fellows and associating in the most casual way."

i.e. the old "wisdom" wasn't wisdom at all because it wasn't derived from data. It was a cognitive default bias of the human species.

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

― Anaïs Nin

> the old "wisdom" wasn't wisdom at all because it wasn't derived from data. It was a cognitive default bias of the human species.

I don't think that can have been a default bias, because humans most definitely do not default to thinking of large grazing mammals as asocial. We're more likely to think of them as belonging to herds.

And we're happy to attribute sociality to animals that really are asocial. That's the default viewpoint.

Not sure if the CNN article is accurately representing the research, but it sounds like the social structure is mostly specific to female giraffes: "Male giraffes, however, only associate consistently with their mothers."

This is surprising, because elephants have huge brains and giraffes have tiny brains. Size isn't everything apparently. I still think there's no question that elephants are more intelligent.

I believe octopi have small brains and from and according to research are fairly intelligent creatures.

My guess is we've been underestimating the intelligence of most animals.

My understanding is that octopus limbs are semi-autonomous, whereas giraffe legs aren't doing any more decision-making than they are for people or cats.

Which is not to say that I disagree that most people underestimate animal intelligence.

All cephalopods lack myelination in their neural toolkit. What this means is that signal propagation between neurons is between 10-100x slower than, say, a mammal, and it makes signal integration over distance a hard problem.

That evolution has found a way to achieve high relative intelligence against such a strong constraint is endlessly fascinating!

Same with "bird brain" as an insult, meanwhile corvid's display quite a bit of intelligence

It depends on the bird though, doesn't it?

I seem to remember (from one of Konrad Lorenz's books maybe?) that while corvids are extremely smart, some other birds are pretty dumb by human standards... I think some raptors, like eagles and hawks, are very simple-minded. It struck me reading this as a kid because I thought eagles were majestic, how come they aren't also smart? Disclaimer: this may very well be outdated scientific understanding of raptors.

I’ve always wondered if the corvids notice how bird-brained all the other birds are.

Brain folding (not size) is thought to be associated with more efficient cognition.

Cortical layers seem to play a significant factor - wrinkles affect the surface area of the cortex, but layers seem to dictate the level of abstraction a species can comprehend - it's one of the biggest differences between reptiles, mammals, birds, and amphibians. While only mammals have a cortex, in other species, like birds, there are layered structures that can approximate cortical function. Animals that lack a layered cortex or analogous feature, or that have fewer layers in the structure, are demonstrably less intelligent. Birds have an advanced pallum, which is what gives them the edge over reptiles.

The last 4-5 years have been wonderful for neural biology.

Interestingly corvid brains are smooth.

Bees are also surprisingly intelligent, and have absolutely tiny brains.

> surprisingly intelligent

Respectfully, I think this is emergent behavior from large numbers of bees. On their own, they aren't going to run an abacus.

My guess is we overestimate human intelligence.

Neanderthals had bigger craniums than homo sapiens (and thus bigger brains), so it does indeed seem like size isn't the biggest factor. Granted, that size difference is much smaller than elephant vs giraffe haha.

I see that your unstated but implied stance is that Neanderthals were less inteligent than homo sapiens. Do we know that? How do we know that?

What I remember being taught in school is that Neanderthals were more intelligent than Cro-Magnons in many ways, but were ultimately less successful (evolutionarily speaking) because they were less social.

By their art, their technology, the environments they could live in, their slow rate of adaptation to change. On and on.

But isn't all that essentially cultural knowledge?

If you compare the art and technology of Homo sapiens 50,000 years ago vs 50 years ago... it's clear that 50,000 years ago gives no inkling of Homo sapiens' intelligence.

So how could we possibly infer that Neanderthals were less intelligent? How could we possibly separate their intelligence from their state of cultural and technology evolution?

Edit: indeed, a quick Google search reveals that the idea that Neanderthals were less intelligent than humans has no real evidence, that it's now considered to be an outdated/discredited view. So wherever you seem to be getting your facts and conclusions from, appears to be wrong.

I've read that Neanderthals were actually more intelligent, but that they were less social than Sapiens. Sapiens ganged up on the more solitary Neanderthals and overwhelmed them through violence or breeding.

Not necessarily wrong, but there isn't much evidence either way.

Interestingly enough, homo sapiens was also really slow to adopt to change for a very very long time. Basic toolkit was unchanged for something like 1M years.

Then cam the Tonga event, homo sapiens population is reduced to less than a thousand individuals (perhaps much less), and suddenly we got creative.

Innovation wasn't a thing before that. It has been everything since.

I was under the impression that the evidence for the Tonga event being the driver of a human bottleneck has weakened in recent years. Is that incorrect?

Think you mean Toba volcano in modern-day Sumatra, Indonesia (https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/h...)

> their slow rate of adaptation to change

This particular failing of Neanderthals resulted more from their extremely small effective population size, i.e. spiralling inbreeding, which eventually lead to total population collapse.

There's not a lot of evidence to support that, though there is some. They could have been wiped out by disease, as opposed to any superior intelligence on the part of us sapiens.

I mean most anthropologists now believe that Neanderthals were at least as intelligent as homo sapiens, and most of us do have some Neanderthal genes...

But not any related to intelligence? Its got do to with depression, addiction, stuff like that?

You'd think we'd have their 'brain genes' if they were any better.

“Intelligence” isn’t synonymous with “evolutionary fitness.” There are plenty of reasons why the genes of a more intelligent species might have had less reproductive success than the genes of a less intelligent species.

Indeed, I think Steven Jay Gould said that the jury is still out on whether intelligence has proved a successful trait for humans, given that we have been around for barely eye blink on evolutionary time scales.

Given that we know next to nothing about intelligence at this level, no one can say that some gene doesn't have any effect on intelligence, especially if it has any kind of effect on the brain.

IIRC, the vast majority of Neanderthal genes that have persisted in to Modern human populations relate to immune system function, but I haven't read anything about depression or addiction-related genes being in that set. Is this a new discovery, or have I just missed it?

Many, many genes can contribute in some (usually very small) way to depression/addiction/other psychiatric disorders, and a single gene can contribute risk to a variety of disorders. So it's not as clear cut of a thing to identify as whether a gene is involved in the immune system. In fact immune system genes have come up towards the top of genome wide association studies for conditions like Schizophrenia. So it doesn't even have a clean relationship with "genes expressed in the brain".

All that is just to say that there is evidence that some Neanderthal mutations are linked to depression risk, but I wouldn't go so far as to characterize any of the involved genes as depression-related. Maybe that's just semantics though.

More specifically here is a relevant snippet from a study summary [1]: "These analyses supported links to traits such as mood disorders, depression, obesity and different types of keratosis. The most significant associations were for mood disorders and depression, for which Neanderthal SNPs can explain up to ~1% of the risk."

IIRC there was also a (less strong) association with nicotine addiction. Not sure about addiction more generally.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg.2016.26

Thank you!

Why is depression not related to intelligence?

As the old ice-age saying goes: it’s not the size, but what you do with it ;-)

Reminds me of:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26344650

…and crows are one of the smartest of all, yet have relatively tiny brains.

Cephalopods are quite intelligent too, there's plenty of intelligence in non-mammals.

One would assume that the big dinosaurs had similar social strengths. I mean when you are effectively un-predatable (!), like an elephant or giraffe, or a homo species with clubs and fire, all your competition is others of your species.

un-predatable? I've seen plenty of predators in Africa happily munching away on giraffe carcasses. There are even a few lion prides who specialize in hunting elephants, but giraffes are commonly prey.

So I happily bow to local / expert knowledge, but my understanding is that giraffe deaths by lions are fairly rare and even when they are eaten scavenging is involved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giraffe#Mortality_and_health

I think it is certainly true that healthy adults are less likely to get taken than the old, sick, or young, as the Wikipedia article points out. But that's true for many prey species.

Here's an apropos shot I took of a lion family in the Linyanti Swamps in Northern Botswana enjoying their giraffe kill- https://www.skeptical.org/lionseating.jpg (and to Wikipedia's point, this one was definitely young).

Coyotes snatch a toddler every once in a while, don't they?

Apparently only one known incident of a child killed by a coyote, according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Keen_coyote_attack

If a dingo counts as similar enough to a coyote, then I would make it 2:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Azaria_Chamberlain

Here's another interesting fact: giraffes only need 5 to 30 minutes of sleep in a 24-hour period! They often achieve that in quick naps that may last only a minute or two at a time.

Take this with a grain of salt, Katie Hunt is actually a giraffe.

How socially complex are the most advanced fish?

How socially complex are elephants?

Giraffes aren't real.

Is this an actual conspiracy theory?

Apparently: The Truth Comes Out: Giraffes Are A Hoax

https://chivomengro.com/2017/10/23/the-truth-comes-out-giraf...

If the truth ever got out and it became common knowledge that one of the most iconic African animals wasn’t even real, and that Disney has been lying to us for decades, the company would be in major economic danger.

I am surprised it isn’t tied in to US politics somehow.

Well, not just giraffes, ALL ANIMALS have been misunderstood, including humans. If we could just respect every sentient animal that would radiate into our society to increase moral and ethic health.

Misunderstood in the value system of western civilisation. I think there are other cultures that afford far more respect to other animals and humans.

Honestly curious, which other cultures have more advanced and fairer human rights setup compared to "western civilizations"?

Are you equating "advanced" with "fairer?" Reminds me of what someone called "chronological chauvinism."

In case of human rights, what would more advanced mean other than one that is more fair to all humans of a particular society or country?

More advanced human rights just simply means more fair human rights, it has nothing to do with chronology or recency. There are plenty of examples of countries that had more advanced human rights in the past and regressed and made things worse over time.

Easy example: Russia had much better human rights for LGBT community not so long ago, however, it has regressed and gotten much worse over last 10-15 years.

If you mean better, why not just say better? Using the word advanced implies that "progress" is monotonic, but you just gave an example of how it isn't. Some regressions may have seemed like advances at the time. We should probably just refer to "changes."

“Advanced”. “Fairer”. (In massive air quotes) lol. Like the advanced and fair culture that is responsible for all the permafrost melt this year? I dunno man, I think it’s the inverse of that. I think all those that adopted Capitalism are at the bottom of those subjective lists you just mentioned.

in other news, in south africa you can buy giraffe paté which is made almost like foie gras

geraffes are so dumb https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/8aqjh/awww_this_is_ju...

Its now well known that Giraffes pee on the shorter creatures after a video taped confession from one of them - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IHhAKnCtKc

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