Pronghorn up close and personal! *🔊 Sound on! Watch to the end to hear a pronghorn breathing.*

See that big nose? That sniffer does more than smell. Some pronghorn nasal and facial veins are structured in a way that helps cool pronghorn down when temperatures rise by returning cold blood to the body. Evaporative cooling of tissue lining the nasal cavity is the main way pronghorn cool off. As they breathe, air flow evaporates mucous over nasal tissue, cooling blood in the veins below. That cooled blood makes its way back through the body and to the heart. Pronghorn skin is also packed with blood vessels that help with convective cooling in summer. But, unlike other ungulates, pronghorn have very little fat underneath their skin, so they depend on a thick coat of fine hairs that grows to keep them warm in winter. Each hair has a hollow structure that, under a microscope, looks like a honeycomb. Pronghorn hair is an incredible insulator and is thicker in diameter than elk and mule deer hair. Pronghorn shed their thick coat in summer, allowing them to use those blood vessels to cool off.
Editor’s note: This video was taken while camera-trapping for bighorn sheep on a steep, rocky hillside. Given that pronghorn are generally animals of open plains and sagebrush basins, we were surprised to see that our cameras caught these pronghorn in such a mountainous environment. We never cease to be amazed by wild animals!
Video and photo by: Pat Rodgers, Wyoming Migration Initiative at the University of Wyoming
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