Much to my embarrassment, I hadn’t considered some of the mortal dangers faced by giraffes.
“If there’s a lightning leader already approaching the ground, it will certainly look for something tall to hit in its immediate vicinity,” says Professor David Smith of the University of California’s physics department. “Since water is pretty conductive (particularly salty water), your giraffe is a pretty good conductor and probably does attract lightning pretty well.”
Oh, it gets sadder and a little bizarre:
Lightning strikes may be a significant danger to giraffes in environments that have few tall trees and are topographically or geologically predisposed to attract lightning. One eyewitness report suggests that, during lightning storms, giraffes lower their heads and may even compete with one another to become lower in height… Between 1996 and 1999 the Rhino and Lion Reserve near Krugersdorp, South Africa, had two of its three giraffes killed by lightning – the third animal, a juvenile, was also struck but survived. Betsy the giraffe was killed by lightning at Walt Disney World in Florida in 2003 in front of lots of witnesses.
I’m guessing the combination of giraffes and lightning isn’t something readers had given much thought either. See? We’re learning together.
One of life’s minor mysterys solved. Thanks Dave.
In a similar vein…
http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/2007/11/giraffe_vs_plane.php
It’s like something out of Gary Larson’s Far Side.
Somehow this has something to do with AGW.
ECM,
I’m pretty sure the number of giraffes struck by lightening in Europe has been increasing steadily since the middle ages. I’d wager that if you plot it on a line, superimpose the rise in CO2-concentration (scaled suitably, possibly logarithmic) and squint a little, it’d be a pretty snug match.
-S
Proof of evolution! See, the fittest animals to survive on wide open stormy plains naturally evolved through natural selection in a series of small and steady mutations until they had long, absurd necks that made them vulnerable to lightning and die horribly, providing lions with pre-baked food. All those smaller, shorter giraffe precursors we can’t find a fossil record for were less vulnerable to lightning and didn’t survive because they weren’t fit for their environment.
Oh wait.
“While it should be noted that, in the Krugersdorp case, the giraffes had been experimentally introduced into an unsuitable habitat, giraffes, cows and other artiodactyls in natural conditions elsewhere are susceptible to death by lightning and entire herds can be killed by a single strike, typically while sheltering under a tree.”
http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/2009/07/mammal_deaths_by_lightning.php
Over time Giraffes will evolve a highly conductive stripe down their bodies. Much like the yellow stripe that Homo-Politicus evolved.
Giraffes always struck me as slightly risible creatures, so the notion that they are more at risk of being struck dead by lightning than, say, wildebeest, somehow seems fitting (if sad).
But they’re really just hypertrophied antelope, and the giraffe pen at the zoo smells exactly like a cow-shed. I imagine a lightning-struck antelope, if of sufficiently recent vintage, must have been a boon to Kalahari hunter-gatherers.