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Old 03-30-2009, 08:39 PM   #77
chrisinhouston
Professor
 
Join Date: Sep 2001
Location: Houston TX
Posts: 1,857
It's Mr. and Mrs. Giraffe! The reserve has 2 giraffes, a male and a female and she is very pregnant right now. Giraffes are most fascinating. They give birth standing up and the baby has to fall to the ground at about a meter or more. They believe that this helps the baby caugh out the fluids from being in the womb. Giraffes only sleep betwee 10 minuts to 2 hours a day and eat most of the rest of the time. They have a complex set of one way valves in their neck arteries to push blood upstream from the heart and conversly to reduce blood pressure to the brain when they bend down to eat plants near the ground. Without this their brains would literally explode from the blood pressure. Their tounge is about 18-20 inches long and can easily stip leaves from even the most thorny plants. These giraffes were the southern species and average between 1.5 to 2 tons and around 3 meters in height. The larger species that live in Kenya can reach 18-20 ft in height because the trees are taller there. They are vey docile and I imagine if you had enough food for them they would make a cool kind of pet!
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