If you\u2019ve ever wondered why the giraffe has such a long neck, the answer seems clear: it lets them reach succulent leaves atop tall acacia trees in Africa.<\/p>\n
Only giraffes have direct access to those leaves, while smaller mammals must compete with one another near the ground. This exclusive food source appears to allow the giraffe to breed throughout the year and to survive droughts better than shorter species.<\/p>\n
But the long neck comes at a high cost. The giraffe\u2019s heart must produce enough pressure to pump its blood a couple of metres up to its head. The blood pressure of an adult giraffe is typically over 200mm Hg \u2014 more than twice that of most mammals.<\/p>\n
As a result, the heart of a resting giraffe uses more energy than the entire body of a resting human, and indeed more energy than the heart of\u00a0any other mammal of comparable size<\/a>. However, as we show in\u00a0a new study published in the Journal of Experimental Biology<\/a>, the giraffe\u2019s heart has some unrecognised helpers in its battle against gravity: the animal\u2019s long, long legs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you\u2019ve ever wondered why the giraffe has such a long neck, the answer seems clear: it lets…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":113491,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[20932,73383,73382,85,46,141,386],"class_list":{"0":"post-113490","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-giraffe","9":"tag-giraffe-anatomy","10":"tag-giraffe-conservation","11":"tag-il","12":"tag-israel","13":"tag-science","14":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113490\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/113491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}