Dispersal, the process where animals reaching sexual maturity move away from family, is important for maintaining genetic diversity and is key to the long-term persistence of natural populations. For most animals, this involves having to make risky journeys into the unknown in the hope of finding new communities in which to settle and reproduce. However, many animal societies—including those of humans—have structured social communities that overlap in space with one-another. These potentially provide opportunities for maturing individuals to disperse socially without having to make large physical displacements. New research published today by Wild Nature Institute scientists and colleagues in the Journal of Animal Ecology shows that this strategy is employed by young dispersing giraffes.

The process of moving away from family is known as natal dispersal. Dispersal is a fundamental biological process that has been shown to reduce the chances of mating with a relative, ensuring that individuals have healthy offspring. However, dispersal is first and foremost a social process. Nevertheless, it has been mostly studied as a spatial process because in most animals, families defend physical areas excluding others, forcing young to have to leave this area to establish their own family. A research team, led by University of Zurich (UZH) postdoctoral research associate and WNI principal scientist Dr. Monica Bond, tested whether animals that live in structured societies comprising social communities that overlap in space with one another could disperse simply by switching communities. Doing so would avoid the risks of moving through the unknown.

The researchers studied a large population of hundreds of giraffes in northern Tanzania. Using data on group composition collected over a huge 2200 km squared area, the team found that most male giraffes leave home once they reach reproductive maturity, and that a significant proportion of these achieve their dispersal by simply switching to new social communities, thereby avoiding the risks of moving far from home. On the other hand, most young female giraffes remained within the same community into which they were born. While sex differences in natal dispersal are well established in animals, this study is amongst the first to demonstrate how living in a structured society provides a unique opportunity for maturing individuals to find a new social community without having to move to new areas.

Complex Giraffe Societies
The team of scientists from UZH and Penn State University previously documented that the adult female giraffes form distinct social communities. The membership to these communities, comprising about 60 to 90 individual females, is very stable over time, despite social groups that are made up of these members merging and splitting throughout each day. They found that these social dynamics have two major consequences. The first is that females maintain enduring social bonds with other females in their community, with bonds likely to last over their entire lifetimes. The second is that these communities are completely structured socially, with different communities using the same physical space. Thus, while individuals from different communities might occasionally encounter one another, they rarely, if ever, form groups together.

“This led us to wonder whether maturing young giraffes might forge relationships with the members of nearby female communities that are different from their birth community, to avoid accidentally mating with their relatives, without having to travel long distances into unknown and possibly dangerous places,” says Dr. Damien Farine, co-author and UZH Eccellenza Professor.

What they found was that, like in most other mammals, dispersal was predominately done by males, with dispersers leaving at about 4 years of age. “The key question was then to ask what strategies young males used to find new communities in which they could search for unrelated mates or avoid conflict with relatives,” says UZH professor Dr. Barbara König, senior author of the study.

Females Stay in the Same Social Networks, Males Switch
The team used social network analyses to quantify the social communities of adult females, and then monitored which community 67 male and 70 female calves associated with as they matured over a 7-year period. The data revealed that while four out of five of young male dispersers switched to social communities different from their birth communities, about one in four of the male dispersers switched communities while staying relatively close their birth site. In other words, they were able to disperse without having to move far at all.

“This type of social dispersal, where males remained close to home but joined different female communities, would not be detected if only spatial movements were measured,” says Bond.

Giraffes may not be unique in being able to disperse socially without having to move away from home. In many other species, including dolphins, elephants, and bats, researchers have reported merging and splitting of groups—called ‘fission-fusion’—within a larger, more stable social community. “It would be interesting to see if dispersing socially within the same physical space is a common strategy that is employed in species that live in societies with many overlapping social communities” Bond says. “Given the importance of maintaining healthy populations, the more we understand the natal dispersal process, the better we can help conserve wildlife.”

According to giraffe expert Dr. Fred Bercovitch, who was not part of the study: “This research has crucial implications for the conservation of giraffes because it demonstrates that the preservation of genetic diversity in giraffes requires saving large ecosystems that allow animals to disperse into different communities, and not the translocation of a handful of giraffes to a new area, where breeding opportunities are limited.”

Last Friday 17th September Wild Nature Institute with Esilalei Primary school in Monduli district celebrated Tanzania’s national animal by hosting a Giraffe Fun Day. The event attracted hundreds of students as well as teachers and elders from the local Maasai community.
Kids built a giant giraffe sculpture out of trash collected from around school, played sports (team Giraffe vs team Rhino!), drew pictures of wildlife, and danced and sang traditional songs. The kids also received a delicious meal of vegetables, pilau, and beans, so that they connect giraffe conservation with food and fun! The aim of this ceremony was to raise our voices that giraffes are endangered and to remind students and the community that it is everyone’s responsibility to protect our environment and giraffes. Teachers and students like these fun days because it gives them an opportunity to express their different talents while celebrating the world’s tallest animal.

Female Masai giraffes live in distinct social communities of up to 90 other friends, and although areas used by these ‘girl gangs’ often overlap, they have very different rates of reproduction and calf survival. This means the girl gang social units may be important to giraffe evolution. These findings were published this week in the Journal of Wildlife Management by a team of scientists from Penn State University and University of Zurich as part of the largest giraffe study in the world. “We used social network analysis of hundreds of females and discovered this girl gang social organization from the giraffe’s own preference and avoidance behaviors,” said Derek Lee, associate research professor at Penn State and senior author of the study. “Gang membership was pretty tight, and even though members of different girl gangs often spent time in the same areas, members of different communities rarely interacted with each other.”
The scientists further found that calf survival and reproductive rates were different among these social communities, even when communities’ home ranges overlapped in space and therefore shared similar environmental conditions. “This shows that population structure can arise from social behavior rather than discrete space use,” noted Monica Bond, lead author and research associate at the University of Zurich. “These social subpopulations have different survival and reproductive rates, so some might have greater competitive abilities than others, like being able to dominate the better-quality food, or there might be cultural differences such as having better strategies for protecting their calves from predators.”
Each giraffe social community exhibited different social characteristics, like how strong the relationships were among the community members. There was also a gradient in environmental characteristics in which the giraffe communities lived: the Tarangire region of northern Tanzania where the study occurred includes two national parks, a livestock and ecotourism ranch, and unprotected lands inhabited by traditional cattle ranchers, as well as several densely populated towns surrounded by agricultural lands. The scientists wondered how the environmental or social conditions experienced by the giraffes might influence their survival and reproduction. “Survival and reproduction together determine whether a wildlife population (or subpopulation like a specific girl gang) increases or decreases and is therefore absolutely critical for conservation,” said Lee.
The team calculated the survival rates of more than 1,400 adult females and calves, and the annual number of calves per female, and examined if there were differences among the social communities. They then investigated if the differences were explained by social factors like the strength of relationships, or by features of the environment, such as how close to people the giraffes roamed, the fertility of the soils, or the kind of vegetation in their ranges.
Giraffe calf survival was higher in social communities that had less area of dense bushlands in their ranges, possibly because lions prefer to hunt in such thickets where they can stalk their prey unseen. “We also found that calf survival and reproductive rates were higher in the social communities that spent more time outside of the national parks,” said Bond, probably also because there are fewer natural predators like lions and hyenas near where people live. Some areas outside the parks also had more fertile volcanic soils and therefore possibly more nutritious food than on other soil types.
“The good news for conservation is that giraffes can survive and raise their offspring in areas close to people,” Lee pointed out. “We can help giraffes to thrive by giving them enough living space in the savanna—both inside and outside of national parks—and by taking care not to disturb them and disrupt their social relationships.”

Wild Nature Institute celebrated the international day of forests by planting trees at Eunoto primary school, at Mungere village. A total of 150 native trees were planted with the help of students. Each student dug a hole and prepared organic manure from cow droppings and did the planting and watering themselves.  Most of the students are coming from Maasai pastoralist communities. The area has plenty of water with a lot of birds and other wildlife from Lake Manyara and Mto wa Mbu.

All trees were planted successfully, thanks to kids who were learning quickly and eager to do the planting on their own. The school administration promised to look after trees and see them grow healthy.

We were joined by village officers and ward forest officers in the event, who were thankful to Wild Nature Institute for doing this for their village

Wild Nature Institute donated 150 of our Celebrating Africa's Giants bi-lingual (Kiswahili and English) children's books to 25 primary school libraries in Kenya, in partnership with Books Are Power, Inc.
These libraries together serve more than 7,000 Kenyan primary school children per year.
We are excited to share some photos of Kenyan children enjoying Our Elephant Neighbours, Juma the Giraffe, and Helping Brother Rhinoceros. These storybooks help make learning about African wildlife fun and accessible, while teaching language skills with the story side-by-side in English and Kiswahili.

Giraffes that group with others live longer
ZÜRICH - A 5-year study of more than 500 adult female giraffes in Tanzania found that individuals that grouped with more other females had higher survival. An international research team led by Dr. Monica Bond, research associate at University of Zurich and Wild Nature Institute Principal Scientist, published their results this week in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The study examined the relative effects of sociability, the natural environment, and human factors on survival of this charismatic megaherbivore, and showed giraffes that are observed in larger groups have higher survival, and that social factors outweighed human and environmental factors.  
“Giraffe group formations are dynamic and change throughout the day, but adult females maintain many specific friendships over the long term,” said Bond. “Grouping with more females, called gregariousness, is correlated with better survival of female giraffes, even as group membership is frequently changing. This aspect of giraffe sociability is even more important than attributes of their non-social environment such as vegetation and nearness to human settlements.”
Bond’s team studied wild free-ranging giraffes over multiple years and documented their social behaviors using network analysis algorithms similar to those used by big data social media platforms. The friends network of giraffes uses mathematics to describe their social patterns, and the team found giraffes are surprisingly similar to people and other primates in their social habits, where greater social connectedness matters. Humans with extensive social networks can take advantage of many more opportunities relative to someone with a more restricted network. Likewise, chimpanzees and gorillas live in communities where ties between many individuals can be advantageous because they facilitate movements among groups and with familiar individuals, which facilitates flexibility of feeding strategies. It seems to be beneficial for female giraffes to connect with a greater number of others and develop a sense of larger community but not a strong sense of exclusive subgroup affiliation.
Why might living in larger groups bring survival benefits for giraffes? Grouping behavior may increase adult survival for species where adults themselves are prey, as larger groups can better detect predators or deflect predation from themselves. But adult female giraffes are far less vulnerable to natural predation than are their calves. Aside from poaching, the main culprits of adult female giraffe mortality are likely to be disease, stress, or malnutrition, all of which are interconnected stressors.
“Social relationships can improve foraging efficiency, and help manage intraspecific competition, predation, disease risk, and psychosocial stress,” noted Dr. Barbara König of the University of Zurich and senior author of the study. Female giraffes may be seeking out and joining with an optimal number of other females in order to share and obtain information about the highest-quality food sources. Other benefits to living in larger groups might be lowering stress levels by reducing harassment from males, cooperating in caring for young, or simply experiencing physiological benefits by being around familiar females.
Features of a female giraffe’s non-social environment were less correlated with survival than her gregariousness, but the study also found that females living closer to towns had lower survival, possibly due to poaching that originates in these areas. Previous research in our study population revealed differences in giraffe behaviors near towns. Closer to towns, adult female home ranges were larger in size and female groups with calves avoided towns.
For the past decade the international team has been conducting the largest study of a giraffe population in the world. The vast scale of their study area in the Tarangire region of Tanzania spans more than a thousand square kilometers and includes multiple social communities, each with about 60 to 90 adult female members. Thus, the study was able to disentangle individual from community level influences on survival. The study is also unique in combining social network analysis and modeling of vital rates such as survival in a sample of hundreds of individuals.

Wild Nature Institute thanks our wonderful financial supporters who fund our giraffe field work, including Sacramento Zoo, Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, Tulsa Zoo, Tierpark Berlin and Zoo Berlin, Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden, Zoo Miami, GreaterGood.org Project Peril, and Save the Giraffes.

We wish a very happy birthday to the brilliant, beautiful, and indefatigable Dr. Anne Innis Dagg, the first person to scientifically study giraffe behavior in the wild. She is an inspiration to giraffologists everywhere!

Wild Nature Institute's giraffe research makes the cover of the Journal of Animal Ecology!

Cover image: Female Masai giraffes that live closer to human settlements have weaker and more exclusive relationships with other members of their social communities compared with those living deep within protected areas. See page 212‐221. Photo by Derek Lee.