There are only five well-documented fatal lightning strikes on giraffes between 1996 and 2010. But due to the population of the species being just 140,000 during this time, it makes for about 0.003 lightning deaths per thousand giraffes each year. This is 30 times the equivalent fatality rate for humans.
Pic by Luca Galuzzi
I highly doubt that…you give me like, I dunno, let’s say 5 people, and a catapult, and I bet you I can hit a giraffe before it gets struck by lightning.
Even more confident if you give me a people-sized potato cannon.
Already started: !lemmaroo@lemmy.world
The head of the chain is currently here: https://feddit.org/comment/1716202
It’s the old lemmaroo!lemmaroo@lemmy.world at this point.
You can edit your giraffaroo to point to this link: https://feddit.org/comment/1716202
But that’s the thing, you’re NOT out there with your catapult, so the statistics still hold true. Assuming you were given the catapult and I was given a giant tesla coil, I believe I would still be able to zap 30x more giraffes than you could hit with your pathetic catapult.
Isn’t it because it’s illegal for us to hit them?
This is mostly caused by Africans wiring up giraffes for use as aerials to pull in distant TV stations.
Insane to think there’s only 140k of them. Seems super low for some reason.
Wild mammals only make up 4% of the total mammal biomass, and that 4% includes whales. We’re just not leaving a lot of room for nature anymore.
This is surprising to me, I grew up in a rural area where deer far outnumbered people. Also you’d think despite their small size the sheer number of rodents in the wild would increase the biomass by more than that. There are large amounts of the earth that is still uninhabited by humans, in mountains, cold climates, islands and keys, oceans, lakes, etc. I’m sure the scientists are right, I’m just shocked.
This is just mammals, so most water creatures aren’t being counted, which is going to be the majority of all animal biomass. So those waters you mention are mostly being ignored, but for living on land and for explaining land usage, just comparing the mammals is more informative.
I suspect that for my country, if you’d add human + pig + cattle biomass together, that you’d end up with about 99% of the biomass of all land animals. The remaining 1% is probably going to be mostly chickens. Other livestock, pets or wild animals will be lost in the rounding error. It’s only a suspicion though, I can’t find actual numbers straight away.
Edit: I did find some numbers after all: humans + pigs + cattle are 99.9% of the mammal biomass in my country. It’s actually worse than I thought it was going to be. I can’t find a number for chickens + birds, just the mammals.
Does it make a difference if I stand in front of the giraffe with a blue card while there’s a zebra climbing onto the giraffes head?
