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Delve deeper into hot topics featured in NGM's June Geographica and Who Knew? with help from Resources. Click on a link, pick up a periodical, browse through a book, and explore!
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The stately giraffe hardly springs to mind as a beast with a body odor problem, but anyone who's whiffed one knows better. In 1924 a British game warden in Kenya claimed that he could smell giraffes 300 yards (270 meters) downwind. Now William Wood, a chemical ecologist at California's Humboldt State University, knows why. He analyzed giraffe hair and found 11 chemical compounds, some quite malodorous (including two that give human feces its smell). Wood thinks they may repel ticks and fungus. What's more, nearly all the chemicals showed antibiotic properties. "Males, more pungent than females, may be advertising that they're healthy and desirable mates," Wood speculates.
—John L. Eliot
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