Why do deer shed their antlers? Detailed answer

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Why do deer shed their antlers? Detailed answer

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Why do deer shed their antlers?

Deer are vegetarians: they feed on moss, bark, buds or aquatic plants. Deer are usually very shy and their safety depends on their speed. They usually feed at night. They have very good eyesight, and their hearing and sense of smell make it easy to detect danger from afar.

Deer come in many varieties, from the small pudoo only one foot tall to the large moose that can weigh over 450 kilograms. The main distinguishing feature of deer is the antlers. Almost all male deer have antlers, and female caribou and king deer also have antlers. Deer antlers are not hollow, like cows, but have a cellular structure.

Each spring, a male deer grows a new pair of antlers, and each winter, at the end of the mating season, he loses his antlers. Some varieties of deer have antlers that are single branches, while others can have up to 11 branches on each antler! Since the number of shoots depends on age, you can tell how old the deer is from the antlers.

In the first year of life, two button-like bulges appear on the deer's forehead. They are called "legs" and the deer never loses them. Each spring, antlers emerge from these legs, which grow back during the summer. In the second year, straight shoots appear from the legs, and in the third year, the first branches. As the horns grow, they are covered with a sensitive skin called "velvet". It is pierced by blood vessels that feed the horns and build up the bone.

When the antlers reach full size, two or four months later, the blood supply is cut off due to the appearance of a ring at the base of the antlers. This causes the horns to dry out and eventually fall off. Usually a deer rubs its antlers against the trees and this hastens their fall away.

Author: Likum A.

Random interesting fact from the Great Encyclopedia:

What body part do chimpanzees recognize each other better than their faces?

To recognize the faces of others, a person has a special part of the brain that helps to identify a face not by a set of individual features, but as a whole picture. This is proved by the inversion effect - if a person is shown the same faces, but upside down, the recognition accuracy decreases, although no features have changed. Chimpanzees also show the ability to recognize the faces of other individuals, but they have a much better ability to identify each other by the rear parts of the body, and it is for this case that the researchers found the effect of inversion in chimpanzees. This is apparently explained by the fact that in the females of most monkeys, during the period of ovulation, the skin around the genitals swells and turns red, and recognition of such a signal has become an important skill for males.

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