When Mystic is greeting guests, it looks as if she is smiling. If you’ve been to Giraffe Platform, you have probably given a piece of lettuce to Mystic! As one of the more curious girls in the tower, Mystic spends the most amount of time greeting guests and crunching on lettuce.

As part of their diet, giraffe are also offered a nice supply of alfalfa hay, and browse such as willow and high fiber grain lettuce. Here at the Fort Wayne Children’s Zoo, the giraffe in our care eat nearly 7,000 heads of lettuce each summer. Have you ever seen a giraffe tongue up close? Measuring between 18-20 inches long, this lengthy tongue is perfect for grasping leaves from high trees! In the dry savannas and sunny Kenya, giraffe in the wild can eat up to 60 different plant species, mainly the acacia tree leaves. The picture below shows the interface of the program.As the saying goes “home is where the heart is”, and Mystic, Ezeji, Luna, and Faye are four giraffes who delight daily in their home at the Fort Wayne Children’s Zoo: Using their tongues they munch on tasty leaves, as they explore their habitat, while the curious onlookers with big smiles let out the occasional “WOW”. We use a pattern-matching software program called WildID developed at Dartmouth College. At the end of each survey, we have at least 1,000 photographs of fur patterns to process and match with photos taken during previous surveys. Giraffe have fur patterns that are unique to each individual, much like a human fingerprint. It is tough, hot, often muddy, and plagued by tsetse flies, but we are privileged to be able to work on such an intimate level with the tallest and one of the most beloved animals on the planet. Each survey consists of driving hundreds of kilometers and photographing every giraffe we see, and then doing it all over again one more time! The whole survey takes about a month, during which we camp in the bush at the end of each long day of searching for giraffes from sunup to sundown. Scientists from the Wild Nature Institute and Dartmouth College conduct three giraffe surveys per year, just after each of the three rain seasons in Tanzania.

We are about to start another survey for giraffes in the Greater Tarangire Ecosystem as part of our Masai Giraffe Conservation Project. Counter-intuitively, trees in areas without large herbivores like giraffes ultimately suffered twice the mortality of trees in areas with large herbivores! The result? A dramatic reduction in growth and survival of the Acacia trees due to the attacks by wood-boring beetles. sjostedti increased - but these ants actively facilitated attack of host trees by wood-boring beetles to make nesting cavities. mimosae decreased, the numbers of their competitor C. 2008), found that when large herbivores were excluded, the trees produced less nectar, resulting in smaller colony sizes of their most active defender, the nectar-dependent C. Their research, published in the journal Science (Palmer et al. The researchers excluded some areas from herbivores, and then measured ant community dynamics and tree growth and survival. A fascinating long-term study was conducted in Kenya examining the complex interactions between large herbivores, ant communities, and whistling-thorn Acacia.

Giraffe whistle