Why are Giraffe's necks so long? (Details )

The camelopard adapted to reach the leaves it likes to eat; the ones that didn’t were not as successful at having offspring.

By eating from leaves way up high, it doesn’t have to compete with shorter animals.

If the giraffe had a long tongue and a shorter neck, where would it put the tongue while it wasn’t eating? And the giraffe doesn’t pull leaves off with its tongue, it bites them off. Pulling with his tongue would hurt.

Yes, Evolution is SO weird.

Keep in mind that their legs are also wide and rather long, primarily for balance. But a giraffe’s legs and hoofs are also optimized for kicking smaller animals that might be tryping to prey on them. A giraffe’s leg, because of the long limb, can get up a pretty good bit of speed in the kick.

Further, giraffe’s run (or better said, lope) fairly rapidly. So if a predator wants to chase it, the giraffe can run and try to get away. All that said, however, there are various cats in the jungle that are far speedier than a giraffe running at full speed.

@zenvelo. Chameleons have long tongues, but regular necks. You need a big throat for big tongue. My dog’s tongue seems to be twice the length of her head. Her neck is wide, but not too long.

I would imagine that they have defended from creatures who had an evolutionary need to have long necks. Many different species have attributes that make little sense to us now. But it takes thousands if not billions of years for physical attributes to change for each specie. Then there is always the likelihood that attributes may not change. In order for a change to occur it is usually conditioned by the necessity of the environment.

This is more or less the same reason whales and dolphins have not evolved to live on land. Either there has not been enough significant time past for their fins to slowly evolve into more typical mammal like limbs or the environment isn’t stressful enough to demand it.

@NerdyKieth. Whales used to live on land. They still have a pelvis. The theory is they moved from sea to land, then back to the sea.
This basically supports your statement.

@MrGrimm888 Yes. It’s all dependent on what the environment dictates. I should have specified this is why whales and dolphins have not evolved to remain as land mammals.

PS – I made an error in my previous response. Should be “descended” not defended lol

So Jeff can reach the top shelf of toys

As @NerdyKeith says, I’d say the reason for a giraffe’s long neck is environmental. Either the leaves gradually got farther from the ground, or there was some sort of fierce competition for the lower leaves over a long period of time.
Sometimes as a species thrives and the individual size increases, the direction of the increase in size is determined by how additional food is gathered. The giraffe didn’t adapt to eating leaves, it adapted to eating ever increasing quantities of leaves. The course was already set. The chameleon had to adapt to gathering larger and larger quantities of bugs.

The same reason certain water birds, like Geese and Herons etc. have long necks. To better forage and hunt. Geese have long necks so they can tip over in the water and forage underwater plants/grasses and sift small invertebrates from the muddy bottoms of shallow ponds and lakes. Herons and other long necked wading birds have evolved long necks to strike out at their prey, frogs and fish from a distance. Longer necks, better foraging range.

Same goes for Giraffes, they have evolved to forage in trees so have a food source advantage.

Well, having long necks isn’t a new thing in evolution. Many dinosaurs had that trait for millions of years. A long,long,long time before giraffes existed. I understand the attribute more in birds and sea dwelling reptiles. But on land, with it making the Giraffe so cumbersome, it seems like more of a disadvantage. They are long, and clumsy beasts. Maybe their sheer size,or stature helps them seem intimidating.

Perhaps their ‘perceived’ massive appearance helps the Giraffe by making it look tougher than they are.

They say, if you encounter a bear, one strategy is to pull your coat high with your arms,to make yourself look bigger. Hopefully intimidating the bear. Blow fish and many other species have similar ‘strategies. ’

@MrGrimm888 It’s possible (however I’m not 100% sure) that giraffes may share a common ancestry with the long necked dinosaurs.

To Giraffes it is an advantage, because it gives them easy access to their food.

This however explains how they drink water

One other evolutionary advantage: They can see things far away before creatures low to the ground.

Just think how many meerkats wish they were 15 feet tall.

That’s what I meant @NerdyKeith. They have to be in a defenseless position to drink. And water holes are the most likely place to be ambushed by a predator capable of taking them down. ‘Bad design’ it seems. But clearly it’s worked well enough.

This is such a good question that it’s been stumping people who work on giraffe evolution forever. The evidence for neck elongation due to available foliage has never been very convincing, although it makes a pretty story. It’s now thought to be due to sexual seIection.

Male giraffes compete for female attention by bashing each other with their heads. They use their long, flexible necks to fling their heads about like weapons. Those with the best weapons win the fight and get to mate, passing on their genes for long necks to future generations.

@MrGrimm888

Yes it is certainly working for them.

As a side note I’d just like to add that the fact that the natural state of any creature can be viewed as “bad design”, seems to be a further reason to why intelligent design cannot be true. Just some food for thought.

I wonder how long it will take humans to stop misunderstanding natural selection (and also mis-applying it to other situations (aka Social Darwinism)).

Mutations are random and driven by biological and genetic details. Mutations are not intentionally designed. It’s only when random variations match the needs of a situation that one random variation prospers.

So it’s some combination of luck and biology and circumstances that giraffes have long necks and not long tongues. Though I might hypothesize that a long neck requires fewer changes to extend farther than a long tongue does, at least for whatever preceded giraffes. Sure there are ant-eater tongues, and frogs, but giraffe necks are much longer than any other large animal’s neck in proportion to the body. I’m not sure what the largest thin tongue is (discounting whales) but I suspect there might be physical challenges in achieving a tongue as long as a giraffe neck.

@Zaku. If all evolution is random , (which I agree with you on) with a little luck. What about camouflage? Some creatures are perfect look alikes for their environment. I saw a beatle once that had the red hour glass of a black widow. From far away it looked like a widow. It was only up close I realized it wasn’t even an arachnid… WTF?

Well…Giraffes also have long tongues, 20 inches, to reach those delicious leaves even higher than they already can get access to with their necks. haha

www.youtube.com/watch?v=THqkzQnfnlw

@Coloma. That’s not long enough. My dog’s tongue is probably 20 inches. She’s no Giraffe. 20 seems inadequate for a giraffe.I know their purple, I bet their tongue is really tough too.

I’ve heard they have the same amount of vertebrae in their neck as a human does. Although the length is obviously quite more. That’s one thick neck.

@MrGrimm888 Camouflage can be pretty amazing to appreciate. It’s clear though that if you had a population of conspicuous animals with some variations that weren’t as obvious to something that likes to eat them, that every improvement in that direction would tend to survive (unless it came with another random side-effect that offset it). Distinct appearance can also be good for mate identification, so if it’s possible that some mutation can create a pattern in one creature, I can see how a similar mutation, if it’s possible in another creature, could work out well if it ever happened in two different species with different needs. All such things are pretty amazing, especially when by chance mutation, but consider that beetles and spiders have been evolving for a huge amount of time, and some of them hatch by the thousand…

Chameleons are also amazing, such as the octopus and the cuttlefish . (Extended but not so funny cuttlefish info here )

Yeah. The cuttlefish and octopuses have an ‘active camo.’ Changing colors depending on many factors. But they seem to understand their perception, as it relates to their visibility. A sort of ‘self awareness. ’

Camo is very confusing to me.