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Big animals must take big bites, right? Well, it depends on what you’re eating!

If you are a giraffe, you’ll be eating leaves off an acacia tree, which are your favorite food – however, if you’re an acacia tree, you’ll want to protect yourself from giraffe eating too much of you! This is why acacia trees have evolved defenses such as sharp thorns to protect their leaves, and why giraffe have a special eating strategy to go around these thorns. Giraffe use the tips of their incredible 18-to-20-inch tongues to curl ever-so-perfectly around a small acacia leaf to pull it off its branch. Think of how you would use just the ends of cooking tongs to grab a small piece of food stuck at the bottom of a pan – it certainly takes some skill!

At the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden, we have our own browse program that allows us to partner with local organizations to give our herbivores – like our herd of giraffe – a variety of browse all throughout the year. Although we get plentiful amounts of browse our giraffe love, the animal and browse staff and the Animal Science team noticed a few things: 1) it’s very tough to provide our giraffe acacia leaves since acacia trees need a very specific climate to grow, 2) the browse we provide (such as mulberry) have much larger leaves that are easy for giraffe to pull off, and 3) since the food was easier to eat, our giraffe are spending less time foraging for food, which in the wild they can spend up to 60-70% of their day doing!

Now knowing that giraffe are used to taking small “bites” of their favorite food, we wanted to mimic the same dining experience that they would in the wild, which would then allow them to spend more time engaging in their natural foraging behavior. But how do we create a “small bite” – we can’t make mulberry leaves smaller! But aha, remember how giraffes have a special power with their tongue? By encasing browse in a wire mesh, we have created small openings for that special tongue to get through, which then allows them to eat our browse like they would acacia leaves in the wild! We just trialed this device a couple of months ago, and we saw our giraffe spending most of the day foraging at this device, which was a huge success.

We are slowly starting to implement more of these special browse devices as the giraffe get used to them, so next time you’re at the zoo, keep a lookout for this device and watch the awesome way a large giraffe takes small bites!