Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

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This is Scientific American's 60 Second Science. I'm Christopher in Taliatta.

Just like humans have virtually unique sets of fingerprints, every giraffe has a unique set of spots.

Not that those spot patterns really help wildlife biologists identify their study subjects in real time.

We have more than 3,000 individuals, so I have a hard time myself, just keeping track of a few

humans. So I have a trouble with giraffes patterns as well. Derek Lee is a wildlife biologist and

population ecologist at Penn State and with the Wild Nature Institute, a research consultancy group.

He and his collaborators have been tracking giraffes for seven years throughout 1,500 square miles in Tanzania,

and they've amassed a library of 70,000 giraffe photos along the way. Photographing the animals

isn't that hard, he says. The hard part is the Sisi flies, constantly biting us in our face and hands

while we're trying to take pictures. Now they've used image analysis software to study the spots of mothers and their calves,

and they found that baby giraffes inherit at least some particular elements of their patterning

from their moms, like how circular the spots are and how jagged the edges are.

They also found that calves with larger spots were more likely to survive their first months on the savannah,

perhaps because the spots better mimic the dappled sunlight in the bushes, where calves like to hide from hungry lions and hyenas.

The results, and a lot of giraffe patterns, are in the journal, Pure J.

It's perhaps not surprising that a physical characteristic that protects an individual from being eaten

passes the test of Darwinian natural selection and gets passed along to offspring.

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