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Okapi

Okapia johnstoni · hard

For most of the nineteenth century the okapi was a rumour. European explorers in the Congo basin heard repeated accounts of a striped forest creature the Efe people called o'api, and largely dismissed them as folklore or as sightings of some forest zebra. It was not formally described until 1901, making it one of the last large mammals to become known to Western science — and when it was, the striped hindquarters turned out to belong not to a horse but to the only living relative of the giraffe.

The resemblance is clear once you look past the stripes. An okapi has the same sloping back, the same skin-covered horns on the male, and the same extraordinary prehensile tongue, long enough to wash its own eyelids and strip leaves from a branch in one pull. The stripes are thought to work as camouflage in dappled forest light, and possibly as a marker a calf can follow through dense undergrowth.

Okapis are solitary and quiet, communicating partly in infrasound below human hearing. They live only in the rainforests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where decades of instability have made both protection and surveying difficult, and their numbers are believed to have fallen sharply.

Where it lives

Worml lists the okapi as native to DR Congo. Its habitat is dense lowland tropical rainforest.

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

Okapi is rated hard. To solve the round you need to name the single country it lives in. How scoring works →

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