The blue wildebeest turns most of its muscle energy into motion
A blue wildebeest can gallop at 80 kilometres an hour and walk 80 kilometres over five days without a drink in heat reaching 38 °C. Its locomotor muscles convert 62.6% of their energy into movement, one of the most efficient ratios measured, which helps explain how some herds manage marathon migrations across African grasslands.
Despite its cowlike bulk, the blue wildebeest is an antelope, one of two wildebeest species. Burchell described it in 1823, and its scientific name, Connochaetes taurinus, mixes Greek for beard and flowing mane with the word for bull. The blue refers to the silvery sheen on an adult's coat; calves are born tawny brown and start changing colour at about two months. Dark vertical stripes on the neck and flanks earn it another name, the brindled gnu.
The species appears to have arisen roughly 2.5 million years ago, and the black wildebeest split from it about a million years ago. The two can still interbreed when fenced into the same area, and their offspring are usually fertile, but hybrids studied at a South African reserve often had malformed teeth, horns and skull bones. Five subspecies are recognised, and the western white-bearded form is both the smallest and the darkest.
Males weigh 165 to 290 kilograms and carry horns up to 83 centimetres long, curving out and up like a pair of brackets; females are lighter and their horns shorter. In Serengeti National Park the animals spent more than half their time resting, a third grazing and 12% moving. Females stay with their mothers and related cows for life and, in the wet season, lead the herd to good grass. About 90% of young males leave for bachelor herds before the next mating season.
Bulls turn territorial at four or five years old, marking boundaries with dung heaps and scent, pawing the ground and bellowing a sound rendered as ga-noo. They are surprisingly tolerant of neighbours: a single square kilometre of plain can hold 270 of them. With around 1.5 million animals and a stable trend, the species is rated least concern, though it has vanished from Malawi.
Source: Blue wildebeest
