Excited! 6: Okapi Facts
(Lots of photos here. You’ll want to LOAD IMAGES. It’s worth it.)
“We’re going to see the giraffe-zebra-horse-things today,”* says one of my fellow campers.
*There should be exclamation points on the end of that sentence, but he’s tryyyyying to mask his excitement. (We all are, to some degree: surprisingly, I'm not the only person caught humming the theme to Jurassic Park over the weekend.)
It's Saturday morning at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, for a global hackathon to combat animal trafficking, sponsored by the US State Department. As part-and-parcel of the deal, we're introduced to a handful of the park’s animals, animals rarely shown this way to the public, up close and personal. The previous evening, we befriended a kestrel (cute), savannah monitors (fiesty), a serval (introverted), and a cheetah (Bahati) and her puppy best friend (Willow).
But this morning?
This morning we’re going to see the okapis.
They’re shy and skittish, so we’re asked to keep our large group to a whisper. At the Zoo Safari Park, the keepers don’t make the animals do anything they don’t want to do.
OKAPI FACTS
Okapis, it turns out, are most closely related to giraffes. Bodies like horses, but heads very much …not so. Legs with a stripe pattern similar to zebra, but very much unrelated. Parallel evolutionary traits.
Okapis are rare—so rare that they’re only found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. While not a direct target of poaching, they’re a collateral target, such as
—and ⚠️ this part is a bit sordid—
when elephant poachers slaughtered six people and fourteen okapis at a wildlife reserve, in retaliation for anti-poaching measures. (Reminder: Poaching is organized crime.)
We meet two okapis, Subira, and her mate Zuri.
When okapis are standing still, their legs twitch, like over-caffeinated sprinters at the mark. Skittish.
Okapi ears can turn independently of each other. They can focus their listening in two directions simultaneously. Quite skittish.
The horns on male okapis aren’t antlers—they’re ossicones, or ossified cartilage. While antlers (which are bone) may snap off or shed, then regrow, the zookeeper notes that ossicones don’t grow back. They’re also covered with skin and fur, and constantly itching.
FUN FACT: partial or deformed horns are called scurs.
“Subira must have said something to the other males, because they haaaaate her. We’ll never know what it was, though.” Why? Okapis speak in infrasound, below the level of human hearing.
Okapi young have a 14-month gestation (oof), because they need to be as fully grown as possible when born, so they have a better chance of outrunning predators.
Okapi fur “scars” easily, but …well, it’s not exactly that. Their coats (described as “the softest thing you will ever touch, softer than velvet” by a starry-eyed grad student working with the park) are naturally loose, so that if a lunging cheetah latches on, the okapi’s fur will just slough off, and it can escape.
Okapi fur is oily. The zookeeper’s fingers are reddish brown from petting Subira’s neck and rubbing inside her ears. (Subira likes her ears rubbed.)
Okapis have long tongues, tongues that can reach their ears and their eyes.
And on that subject: okapi eyes. Okapis have excellent night vision, sure, yes, but THAT IS NOT WHAT WE’RE GOING TO TALK ABOUT. We’re going to talk about something exponentially more interesting.
The eyes of okapis have nictitating membranes: third eyelids, like those of some reptiles, birds, or sharks. (Humans have a flap of skin that’s a vestigial remnant of a nictitating membrane.)
HOWEVER
—and here is where it gets preetttty amazing, y’all—,
the nictitating membranes of okapis pull their eyeballs back into their skulls when they blink (!!!). If you’re running through dense brush, it makes sense to have a reflex that protects your eyes.
(watch this video in slow motion)
It's one of the freakiest, most wondrous things to see in person.
Because you read allllll the way to the end, the password is nictitating.
WHAT THE HECK, TODAY IS WORLD OKAPI DAY??? I swear, I didn't plan that at all.
- [✓] Finally finished a twitterbot (from MAILLARD, ages ago). It mashes improv prompts together with karaoke songs to create prompts to make your karaoke nights …uh, more challenging. (Source here.)
- [✓] ODO was fun! SRCCON is a laudably well-run, tremendously worthwhile conference, even to a relative industry outsider. One of the niftiest things (of many) that I saw was this new tool for “giffable audio.”
- [✓] Was a guest on the Sketchnote Army podcast, awkwardly effusing about XOXO, sketchnoting practice, digital tools, and how to draw people. (Thanks, Mike!)
- [✓] Went to XOXO (not a codename), drew sketchnotes, hung out with good friends, felt feelings, ate from ALL the food trucks.
- [⋯] No armtwisting involved: starting BOMBILATE. Still ginning up, but super! excited! as …you miiiiight expect from the codename. Or from just knowing me. (Recorded a full hour at XOXO in a perfectly-Portlandian converted airstream trailer podcasting studio, and then …lost everything.) More details, and (of course) extreeeeeme enthusiasm, coming quite soon.
- [⋯] Halfway through the interviews for SYD, and it’s so. much. fun! Really impressed with Cast for recording. Will have more to say about this in early November.
- [⋯] Fiddling with PiBakery for MUSCULUS, in the hopes that it will make configuration easier. Will be formatting 15 micro SD cards this week. So much to do on this.
- [⋯] Finishing configuration of a touchscreen and some large iPads for installation of ANTHOZOA. (It’s been fun to go behind the scenes for this one.)
- [⋯] Had a (second) brainstorming call with New York this week for ANTELOQUY. Really hope we figure out a way to do this one, because it is right up my alley.
- [⋯] Working on ideas for HATCHEL, another remote project. Also exciting, partly because of who I’m collaborating with!
- [⋯] MAILLARD is doing an art show in early December! What to make, what to MAKE? Inspired by this project and (via Alex) this craziness (TINY EYEPATCHES, Y’ALL), I want to visualize magnetoreception by making a camera simulation of activated retinal cryptochromes. I only vaguely understand what I just wrote.
- [⋯] After being pushed back by some rather big changes to scope (supporting off-the-shelf magnetic stripe readers and receipt printers and bluetooth barcode scanners for special events), ATREYU should launch at the end of this week. Whoa. This will be a busy week.
- [⋯] Have I mentioned the secret 100-day project I started back in August, inspired by Susan and Lucy? It’s a bit waylaid, and I still foolishly think I can finish. (Looking at everything above: ha. Ha ha ha. Hahahahaha.)
- [→] RIO GRANDE and COLLINS and HAMMERSTEIN are still getting bumped, but MUSCULUS will probably help them get done.
- [→] Less involved now with JULIAN and FYNBOS, they’ll still launch in the next few weeks and months.
- [→] We got the grant for MAXELL(!), for an undertaking less intense than what we proposed. Now: in brainstorming with three museums to figure out ways to grant digital accomplishments real positive consequences.
- [→] BROECKEN is still not done. Kyle from MAILLARD recommended this library.