Researchers Studied Cute Pictures of Baby Giraffes to Learn About Their Spots
Researchers Studied Cute Pictures of Baby Giraffes to Learn About Their Spots
A new study shows giraffes’ iconic puzzle-piece markings aren’t random, and the size and shape may help little ones survive their first months of life
Giraffes
(Wikimedia Commons)
By Jason Daley
smithsonian.com
October 3, 2018 12:48PM
Where does a giraffe get its spots? The question seems simple enough, but the gentle giants’ iconic interlocking spotted coats have puzzled researchers for years. Now, reports Jennifer Leman at ScienceNews, a new study suggests those giraffe splotches are passed down from mother to child, and the spots’ size and shape can have a big impact on whether or not a young giraffe survives.
One of the study’s authors, Penn State biologist Derek Lee, tells Leman that the most common question people ask about giraffes is why the creatures have spots and whether those spots run in the family. Previously, scientists suspected that the spots could be totally random patterns or that perhaps environmental variables led to different sizes and shapes. But no one had really set out for a definitive answer before, Lee notes.
“We didn’t have any answers,” he says. “So we used our data to get them.”
Over the course of four years, Lee and his team photographed the coats of 31 sets of mother giraffes and their babies. Using image analysis software, they looked at 11 traits, including size, shape and color, to determine if the animals passed along their spot patterns. Two of those traits—circularity, or how round they were, and softness of the spots’ edges—were strongly linked between parent and child, indicating a hereditary element, the team reports in a paper published in the journal PeerJ.
Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/giraffes-inherit-their-spots-their-mamas-180970456/#21BO6uXctrF2S9sL.99
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