![]() ![]() Cervids don’t usually dump much energy into their headgear until more vital physiological boxes have been checked the structures are hypersensitive to a deer’s diet, stress levels, infection status, and more. (One now-extinct species, the Irish elk-neither Irish nor an elk-holds the record at a whopping 10 percent, thanks to its 12-foot, 90-pound antlers.) Such disproportionate displays may especially behoove the big-bodied: Already massive moose would be hard-pressed to tell the difference between themselves and another male that’s just an inch taller at shoulder height, but a four-inch difference in antlers is far easier to spot.Īntlers are also a very honest advertisement of the resources a male harbors in excess. ![]() The centimeters-long antlers of pudu, the world’s smallest deer, account for a wee 0.1 percent of total body mass, while elk haul around labyrinthine branches that can make up 3.5 percent of their weight. Large animals are more efficient at expending energy, and as cervids grew in size, their antlers got bigger both absolutely and proportionally to their body, according to Ummat Somjee, who’s studying animal weapons at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. ![]() This motivation might help explain just how huge antlers became. “If they can figure it out right then, the little guy walks away.” “They’ll prance side by side, look at each other, posture, strut,” Emlen told me. That still seems to be the logic of antlerdom: These displays are cranial-bone-measuring contests that can keep some of the males in competition mostly wound free. If large and intimidating enough, they could scare the bejesus out of other males before physical contact was made. (Antlers, by the way, aren’t the same as horns, which never fall off- except pronghorns, which are unique in other ways.) As tusks had, these new spindly structures likely manifested first as weapons, offering ancient deer fresh oomph to push and parry their rivals.Įven early on, males with heftier headgear undoubtedly had an edge-and the more open cervids’ habitats became, the more space their antlers had to balloon. Then, as the dense forests of the early Miocene gave way to grasslands and fields, the first antlers appeared, eventually replacing most deer species’ tusks. These toothy tussles often ended “in severe injury or death,” says Nicole Lopez, an evolutionary biologist who will soon begin her graduate work at the University of Montana. Males fought one another with tusks-effectively, ultra-elongated snaggle teeth-stabbing, gnashing, and slashing until their hides were freckled with punctures and their necks were striped with blood. Millions of years ago, the tops of the skulls of the earliest deer were entirely bare. Antlers are a proclamation, majestic enough to attract the attention of deer and humans alike-enough that we may be reshaping the appendages before our knowledge is complete. And scientists are still working to understand why deer annually jettison these “ improbable appendages,” the objects of our envy and one of the greatest energetic investments the animals make. No other mammals regularly discard and regenerate bits of bony skeleton like this. The pace is so speedy that deer must pillage minerals from other parts of their skeleton, only to cast their antlers away and sprout a new pair when the seasons turn once more. At the height of spring and summer, some big-bodied cervid species can sprout antlers at a rate of about an inch a day, surpassing the pace of fetal formation and even cancerous tissue growth. They weaponize naked bits of skeleton they “grow faster than any other animal bone,” says Doug Emlen, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Montana. Antlers are crowning biological achievements that do what no other tissues can. The bareness of the bone, embossed with wrinkles and bumps that I could touch if I stood on my toes, made me imagine all that the antlers might have been, had Tony survived. In the corner of the living room where Tony’s head was perched, his antlers stretched from wall to wall, tines arcing toward the ceiling. “And then he made us eat him.” I hated the circumstances of Tony’s death. Years later, my brothers regaled me with the tale of Tony, as they posthumously named the buck. In the 1980s, shortly before I was born, my father killed a male white-tailed deer in the woods of Oklahoma, harvested his flesh, and mounted his head. ![]()
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