OtakuCouple Reacts: You Have No Idea How Weird Giraffes Are (Casual Geographic)

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]So, what's up family, we're back with Reacted's here for the channel with some more casual geographic. You have no idea how weird giraffes are.

[00:00:07]That's a shame cuz I thought they were pretty weird to begin with. So, if I don't even know for real then it's about to get real freaky in this damn video. Y'all be sure to comment, like, subscribe, every little bit helps.

[00:00:18]Check out the Patreon link down below for full uncut reactions to TV shows, animes, and movies. Let's hop on in. You know you shouldn't have clicked on this video cuz now you're going to find out what giraffes sound like. You went your whole life thinking they don't make a sound, but you bet your ass they do. I said that can't be real.

[00:00:37]We used to think giraffes were like the G in lasagna or post-2011 Osama, dead silent. And scientists swore that an animal with that neck situation would be physically incapable of generating enough airflow to say anything audible.

[00:00:48]Moral of the story, sometimes you got to mind the business that pays you. And it wasn't until someone was in the business of paying researchers to mind the giraffes that they heard the humming of voice the colors from the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack. Over the course of 8 years, they recorded nearly a thousand hours of audio of giraffes in zoos. And they found that giraffes will hum to each other in the dead of night.

[00:01:06]Although, if they would have listened to the locals, they would have found out sooner cuz over 100 residents in Paignton complained of a creepy droning sound coming from the zoo's giraffe house. Sounds that folks were claiming were making them physically sick to the point where they made a petition to incite an investigation. And the zoo both declined to comment, but also said it wasn't a giraffe, but also said their lawyers would be looking into it. Gee, I thought you said no comment. So, you know this study must have been vindicating. As for the zirafa, we now know what does a giraffe say, but we still don't know why. It could be how giraffes keep track of each other at night. Maybe it's how a beast with a trachea gets to let off long snores.

[00:01:40]Maybe it's a demonic giraffe ritual. Or maybe it's like birds where to us there's no meaning, but to them the intentions are rated. And that is only the surface of how weird this walking didgeridoo is. You have no [screaming] idea insane giraffes are as a concept.

[00:01:53]Like you might not realize the closest you can get to Jeff Goldblum's wet dream is by rage baiting the tallest animal alive. That'll earn you a one-way ticket to Jurassic Park. Now, ignoring whatever they did to get Jeffrey that active, one of the consequences of being the tallest is despite a motivated giraffe nearly breaking 40 mph, they're sentenced to life of running the way we do in dreams.

[00:02:11]They could be running from certain death, but damn it, they're going to look majestic doing it. To be fair, if [laughter] you make a giraffe do all that, I'm on his side. You definitely You You deserved it. Another consequence is this video right here. This video went viral cuz it was the first time many realized animal with a neck longer than the prohibition has a tank inclement weather right to the face. Fun fact, giraffes don't use slurs. But the day we learn how to ask one how's the weather up there in giraffe-ese, they'll start. But nature didn't completely leave them out to dry.

[00:02:38]I mean, obviously. Now, but they do have a trick in plain sight. Those iconic giraffe patches also have a network of blood vessels. It's like a built-in thermostat where they can expand to release warmth to stay cool during the heat of day, but can also constrict and hold heat in times like when they have to rawdog a rainstorm. Also, the nature of being the tallest means it's actually more dangerous for them to lay down in the rain than just stand up to the storm. Now, the chances a giraffe gets struck by lightning are very, very low.

[00:03:02]They're still 30 times more likely to get touched by Thor than a human. Now, the chances they get electrocuted on power lines is slightly [music] higher.

[00:03:10]To be fair, that's human intervention and poor design. That's not their fault.

[00:03:13]Especially cuz having a neck and legs longer than a mundane August already comes with problems nothing else can relate to. Giraffes have one hell of a childhood, and it starts with them getting dropped 6 ft flat on their face.

[00:03:24]Literally air-dropped into existence on their heads cuz once again, a mother laying down to give birth would be the easiest lick of a lion's life. Also, as babies, we had doctors to slap us into breathing. Giraffes get the ground. To their credit, at 6 ft 220 lbs, the Giraffa camelopardalis can find its feet in only 30 minutes. But they get reintroduced to the ground several times in the process. And in only a few hours, the baby giraffe can run and stride with its mother, which isn't a luxury cuz there are many things to run away from as a newborn giraffe calf, [music] and more than half will get snatched by actual predators. Luckily, the mother will defend them to the death, and a kick from over 2,000 lb of motivated motherhood will leave a lion lying on the ground permanently. They have sharp hooves the size of dinner plates. That's instant attitude adjustment to any predator. Ooh, that's a concussion. And of course, having legs higher than student loans gives them more rings than most animals are ready for. It just sucks when mama ends up being the baby's biggest op. When I said the mother defends them to the death, sometimes she's the one delivering it. I have seen too many mothers trying to scare off lions only to end up river dancing on their child. Like, "The operation was a success, but the patient died." It takes 14 months for a mother giraffe to birth a calf, and only 0.2 seconds to accidentally delete her dependent. I'm not dumb to how hard piloting 6-ft flesh stilts must be, but I've seen quadruple amputees shoot with more accuracy than a giraffe using her own legs. And that's assuming it's an accident. This was straight-up intentional.

[00:04:46]And I still don't know why she did that.

[00:04:48]Things don't get much easier in zoos, either, as captive giraffes have accidentally stepped and sat on their own children. So, fatal friendly fires are just another consequence of being tall. Another is that giraffes are one of the few mammals that can't swim, and they play river roulette every time they cross one. And you just know his heart drops straight to his stomach.

[00:05:05]And that ain't nothing. That's like a two-story drop. At this point, it really feels like being tall is more trouble than it's worth, to the point where you got to ask, "Why are they so tall in the first place?" The answer might seem pretty obvious, but like the giraffe, it's more controversial and more complicated than you think. The easy answer is to say that giraffes evolved long necks to reach foliage that no other herbivore could. And while that might be true, I do want to clear something up real quick. Evolution is a lot of things, including a word I don't use anymore because I respect women. But what it's not is intentional. Master Oogway might have been a creationist.

[00:05:35]Evolution is all random and accidental.

[00:05:37]Basically, it's a random mutation, like a slightly longer neck, that gave an individual an edge. And with long necks seeing better reproductive success, that random mutation would have a much better chance of getting passed on. After millions, and I do mean millions of years of natural selection, long necks would become the dominant and eventually the only giraffe build. Just a series of events creating something not perfect, but just good enough to keep the wheel rolling. The babirusa literally lobotomizes itself with its own dental, but as long as that happens after they have kids, evolution will remain Ray Charles to it. But with giraffes, it seems straightforward, [music] so much that when you learned about natural selection in school, the giraffe was probably the easiest example. Now, what if I told you we still can't agree on how the giraffe got this way? Every theory seems to have at least one good counter. It's easy to believe that the tallest giraffe would have a nutritional advantage, except a 2010 study showed that in a drought, it was actually the tallest and largest giraffes that died the most. Also, some argue that if being tall was such a buff, more herbivores would have evolved the same way. Yet, the gerenuk seems to be the only one that went down the all height pipeline.

[00:06:39]You know, we don't talk about this enough, and we really should. This is 100% responsible for a cryptid myth or two.

[00:06:45]Others say it's the built-in temperature setting that was the real driving force.

[00:06:49]A popular theory is that animals live by the three F's, and the long necks, if not for food, must be for sex. If it was for female validation, you'd expect the males to have disproportionately longer necks. But even though the males are physically bigger, it's actually the females that have more proportionally impressive necks, which actually led to another theory that the neck work was actually to support the females' high metabolic demands while pregnant.

[00:07:10]There's even a theory that the giraffe's neck wasn't even the main feature, that they evolved long legs first, and the long neck came after so the giraffe could still reach water. Maybe not the strongest theory, but for sure the funniest. But to me, there's likely no one thing, more like a combination of things driving the giraffe to be what it is now. Except I did leave one thing out, cuz even with feeding and forking, there's a third F word that's just as important. In 1996, a long-dead relative of the giraffe was discovered in China.

[00:07:36]Discokeryx xusha looks like the modern version's reflection in a funhouse, and scientists say the thick neck and even thicker skull were used to violently headbutt each other. And scientists studying its anatomy say that not only would this half of giraffa have headbutted harder than any other animal, including dinosaurs, but being built like a sledgehammer and behaving like one is proof that the giraffe's neck was more about fighting than food. And while I'm still sure it was a combination of different pressures, I can see it being for fighting. You've definitely seen giraffes fight like two inflatable car salesmen in a turf war.

[00:08:06]As goofy as it is, they do damage.

[00:08:09]That's exactly what those are for. Those are ossicones, not horns, but ossified cartilage. Basically, if your ears got bricked up no mortar. Those ossicones are great for bludgeoning their opponents into oblivion. They're also good for butting a female in the bladder to make her pee so he can taste test it and assess her availability. Don't let the lower frame rate fool you. Those ossicones genuinely tear each other up.

[00:08:30]That was the winner, by the way. Now, the difference is animals with antlers shed them once a year. That's not blood, that's moose velvet. Giraffes don't. Not just cuz the cones are fused to their Jurassic skull, but also giraffes breed all year round, which means they got to be ready for smoke all year round. Like you don't even know the giraffe fight club genuinely goes crazy. Like they have rules. The first one I've already broken. So, we'll just talk about the others. Giraffe fights are brutal as hell. Basically, boxing mixed with Mortal Kombat. Watch two bulls trade blows, eventually you'll see a giraffe faint, counter, and uppercut. Their fighting style even evolves as they mature. Younger males usually swing for the biggest target, being the ribs or the rump, but older seasoned bulls often chip away at their match-up by targeting the legs. Not only cuz weakening the legs is the fastest way to fell a tower, but a giraffe that gets his leg broken is immediately disqualified from the gene pool. That's a career ending injury for buddy. But look at it this way, there's a lion pride that's not going to believe their luck. Giraffe fights are so devastating that they rarely even get to that point. In fact, most times giraffes are weirdly ethical fighters, and I'm so glad I get to talk about that now. Giraffes are like baseball players where they have a preference between swinging their neck to the left or the right. And what's crazier is they'll actually respect each other's preference. In sparring matches, they'll line up head to tail if both fighters have the same preference. So, like if two southpaws line up head to tail, both parties get to practice swinging to the left. With the same logic, if one's a southpaw and the other's orthodox, then they'll line up head to head with a right-favoring fighter on the left. And if during a spar match, one giraffe swings too hard and his momentum puts him out of position, both sides will stop, realign themselves, and briefly start again. That is mighty gentlemanly.

[00:10:04]It's a mutual respect you wouldn't expect from a camelopard. That's not the only point in a giraffe's code. Giraffes also believe in weight classes.

[00:10:11]Researchers watching quickly realized that males will go out of their way to fight opponents as close to the same size as them and will reject matches with males noticeably smaller. Instead of an easy win, sparring giraffes will go for the fair fight because skill-based matchmaking is not a human concept. Giraffes are even known to follow the bar fight phenomenon, where if one pair starts sparring, that seems to get all the other giraffes to start running it. And rarely do you see any giraffe attempting to cheat. Arguably, the only questionable action is older bulls will sometimes interfere with and break up fights between youngerlings.

[00:10:40]Some say it's the old heads playing referee. I think it's straight hating.

[00:10:44]I'm not even kidding, older bulls will meddle in fights and I'm sure it's to keep any one male from getting too comfortable and confident cuz a cocky male is a problem for everyone. But yeah, that neck and those cones are good for more than just drinking from the golden fountain. And while males using maximum effort is straight blood sport, like bro is not waiting on a bell, he's waiting for him to stop breathing. For the most part, males keep it peaceful.

[00:11:02]Some say a little too peaceful. There's another interesting fact about giraffes and before y'all get mad at me, all I ask is that y'all hear me out cuz male giraffes have a special way of making up after a fight and that has caused controversy in ways I'm sure the giraffes did not see coming. Giraffe sparring matches have been known to end with the two bulls caressing each other's necks and lightly nudging each other. It's believed it's how two males reinforce their bond and standing in the overall group. It's really no different from guys dapping each other up after a pickup basketball game. Basically, I'm good, you good, we good. That's what I thought until this 4-ft pink lightsaber came out and he tried to mount the other. And it's that kind of behavior that has people saying this portrait mode stretching the neck unicorn is one of the gayest animals out there. Not derogatory. Apparently, enough of these necking competitions come to a conclusion with at least one of the males doing so as well. Sometimes to completion. Sometimes they arrive long after they show up. There was a study in Tanzania on the social life of the giraffe and in over 3,200 hours of observation, the team witnessed 17 instances of male-on-male mountings. The number of male-on-female? One. So, not only did 133 days of study amount to witnessing a traditional giraffe couple up once, the math means 94% of the explicit long-neck liaisons were between two males. That's how giraffes became the mascot of Brokeback Mountain and you've had politicians get genuinely heated over the stretch-neck sexuality.

[00:12:22]So, are giraffes gay? Listen, I'mma give my non-expert online opinion and pray I don't kill me. A lot of animals will mount to flex dominance or to bond. Dogs do it, bison do it. Go to any locker room and you might see the football team doing it and they say it's not gay. Male lions might be the most famous for doing it, but it's more social than sexual.

[00:12:40]Giraffe male mounting is likely for dominance and that 94% is probably more about giraffes being rare to witness actually mating in the first place than 90% of giraffes just swinging the other way. I do think it's a little bit of putting human traits on an animal with no concept of gay like like you got to remember, we are the only species on Earth that goes out of its way to say pause. Giraffes don't give a [ __ ] Well, they might give one. Jokes aside, male giraffes can mount each other without it being sensually explicit. The same way they can taste a female's bladder assets without, you know, being into that. But with a giraffe, they might do gay [ __ ] but I don't mean [ __ ] gay. And that's on being an ally. But like I said, the kosher camel is so much [laughter] That's not a joke. Giraffes are kosher, biblically accurate. Bet giraffe on that. How about the fact that we only just found out that there are actually four species of giraffes and we only know that because a conservation group decided to test their DNA for funsies, and that test showed that the northern, southern, reticulated, and Masai giraffes are all completely different species. In total, there are seven subspecies of the giraffe. Some are endangered, some are critically endangered. See, now you don't took the giraffes for granted. I bet they didn't even tell you that some are silently going extinct. Experts literally call it a silent extinction because while you weren't paying attention, the Kordofan giraffe is silently getting canceled.

[00:13:52]And the Nubian be out of be in past tense. Which would be a shame because giraffes are like nothing on Earth.

[00:13:58]Which is another fact. Giraffes have the strangest cousins. The pronghorn antelope is actually more of a giraffe, and the okapi was nature's first day using Microsoft Paint, and it's basically the giraffe of the jungle.

[00:14:08]They're just too weird to not get a video of their own. So, that's going to do it for this video. Drink water, hug your mother, touch grass, hug your father. If you're like me and giraffes dropping is your newest concern, I'm going to be donating to the Giraffe Conservation Foundation. Link in the description if you'd like to as well.

[00:14:24]And I'll see y'all in the next one.

[00:14:27]Yeah.

[00:14:30]Oh, oh, oh, oh, why would you do that?

[00:14:33]>> [clears throat and cough] >> Uh I don't think that was a Was it?

[00:14:43]Oh, now you back up.

[00:14:46]He test you, gangster, bro.

[00:14:51]You are so so brave.

[00:14:57]Wow. That's >> it takes is one little uh Yeah.

[00:15:00]the leg. Once again, I have learned more than I ever thought I was going to learn about giraffes.

[00:15:05]>> Yeah, but look, there's a red panda.

[00:15:09]It's not a friend. It is a friend. It's friend-shaped, not friend. No. It is a friend. Did you didn't watch the video?

[00:15:17]>> did. It just reestablished friend.

[00:15:23]Look at his little face.

[00:15:26]Well, thank you, Otaku fan, for joining us for this educational journey into the life of giraffes. Did you learn something new today? I'm sure you did.

[00:15:32]Let us know what your most fascinating [laughter] factoid was about the giraffes down below.

[00:15:37]>> factoid. Same here. We'll see you for the next video.

[00:15:41]>> [laughter] >> Bye.

[00:15:44]>> [music] [music] [music] [music]