Zoo Miami staff found a juvenile giraffe dead with a broken neck Saturday morning. She was 3 months old.
The incident occurred at night, when the zoo was closed, and no staff members witnessed how the animal died, according to a statement.
It appears, though, that the giraffe ran into a fence, possibly after it was startled. It’s unclear at the moment what could have startled the animal.
“We don’t have any footage in that area of the giraffe habitat,” said zoo communications director Ron Magill, “and that’s something they’re looking at — are they going to be able to install cameras, because we’d sure like to know what caused that.”
Could a local predator, such as a coyote, have gotten into the enclosure? “Absolutely. There’s no question, but we checked all around the area, there were no tracks or any evidence of that. We didn’t see any evidence of any kind of predator. For all we know it could have been a wasp that stung it in the middle of the night and freaked it out.”
Giraffes are typically not active at night, said Magill. They rarely lie down, and usually sleep standing up.
The staffers found the juvenile giraffe at 7 a.m., and it was already in a state of rigor mortis. “That tells us it had been dead for at least a couple of hours, probably longer,” said Magill.
The rest of the herd has not displayed any signs of distress, injury or stress. There are three other slightly older juveniles in the herd, said Magill.
The mother and father of the calf are also in herd. “We don’t really know what’s going on inside they’re mind,” said Magill. “It’s got to be obvious that something went wrong, because the juvenile was dead in the middle of the herd.”
Other recent animal deaths at Zoo Miami include “Berani,” a 15½-year-old Sumatran tiger, who was euthanized after a severe decline in health due to cancer of the spleen in November 2023. Berani sired two cubs with a female named “Leeloo.” There are an estimated 500 Sumatran tigers remaining in the wild.
In November 2022, “Dalip,” a 56-year-old Asian elephant bull was euthanized after a long decline in health, and a fall from which he could not recover, according to a release. The zoo believed him to be the oldest elephant bull in the country. He arrived in the States from India as a 1-year-old calf in August 1967, and originally lived at the Crandon Park Zoo on Key Biscayne.
