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Giraffe

Giraffa camelopardalis · easy

A giraffe has seven neck vertebrae, the same number as a human and almost every other mammal. They are simply enormous. That neck creates a circulatory problem no other land animal faces: the heart has to push blood two metres upward to the brain, at a blood pressure roughly twice ours, while a network of vessels at the base of the skull prevents that pressure blacking the animal out when it lowers its head to drink.

The tongue is nearly half a metre long, prehensile and dark-pigmented, apparently as protection against sunburn during hours of feeding. It strips leaves from between the thorns of acacias, which respond by releasing bitter tannins and a chemical signal that neighbouring trees detect — so giraffes tend to browse into the wind, reaching trees before the warning does.

Males fight by necking: swinging the head like a club, using the ossicones and the mass of the skull. It is far more violent than it looks.

Giraffes were long treated as a single widespread species, but genetic work has argued for several distinct ones. Their numbers have fallen substantially across much of Africa in recent decades — a decline slow and quiet enough to have been called a silent extinction.

Where it lives

Worml lists the giraffe as native to 13 countries — Angola, Botswana, Chad, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Its habitat is savanna, open woodland and scrub.

Ranges here are reduced to whole countries for playability and exclude introduced populations — see about the data for what that simplification leaves out.

In the game

Giraffe is rated easy. To solve the round you need to find any 7 of its 13 listed countries. How scoring works →

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