Why do male giraffes, potential mates, drink pee?

Female panthers have a great Valentine’s Day gift for potential partners: urine.

Distinctive anatomy helps male giraffes taste whether a female is ready for mating, Animal Behavior Lynette and Benjamin Hart report January 19. Animals. Researchers found a pheromone-detecting organ in giraffes with a stronger connection to the mouth than to the nose. For this reason, the males explain that the females stick their tongues in the stream of urine.

Animals such as male goats lick fresh urine on the ground to detect if females are ready for mating. But giraffes’ long necks and heavy heads bent to search for urine on the ground make it an unstable and vulnerable place, says Lynette Hart, University of California, Davis.

The researchers observed the giraffes (Giraffa giraffa angolensis) in the Etosha National Park in Namibia in 1994, 2002 and 2004. A male cheetah would strip or kick a female to get her to pee. If he was a spontaneous participant, he mingled in a short time, and the male took a draft. Then the curled male drew his lip to his mouth, a response behavior called flehmen, which would draw the female’s scent through two holes in the roof of his mouth. From the mouth, the scent travels to the vomeronasal organ, or VNO, which detects pheromones.

The deer say they have never seen a panther spill urine on the ground.

Unlike many other mammals, giraffes have a stronger oral connection — via the duct — to the VNO than the nasal one, examinations of preserved panther specimens have shown. One possible explanation for the difference is that the VNO-nose connection helps animals detect seasonal plants at certain times of the year, says Benjamin Hart, a veterinarian also at the University of California, Davis. But giraffes can mate at any time of the year, so the nose connection doesn’t matter much.