Which santa reindeer is female

After all, with the word of the year announced to be "feminism," finding out that Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, etc. Did you know that male reindeer lose their antlers in December?

Thankfully Santa is a man and knows directions or they'd never find where they're going. Didn't u know? Female reindeer don't fly; their only function is to make baby boy reindeer that will. Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies.

Females drop their antlers after giving birth in the spring. It's hard to know exactly why except that huge antlers could be a significant survival drawback over the winter and might be most important for competition with other males during the mating season.

The advantages for females would be to use them for protection against wolves, their primary predator when they are pregnant, and to protect their newborns. And female reindeer us their antlers to brush away snow to find food in the winter. So, given the dates of Christmas, all the males would have dropped their antlers. So the pictures of Dasher and Dancer and the rest of Santa's reindeer with antlers suggest they must have all been female.

So what about Rudolf, the red-nosed one? Well, maybe Rudolf was a male outside the average who didn't drop his antlers and along with his red nose, which led to such inappropriate bullying, or maybe Rudolf was a girl guiding the way through long Christmas night. Popular culture can often portray the differences between male and female very unfairly.

Rudolf, not so much. We talk more and more about the biological differences between males and females and how that might affect the way we provide medical care. Don't trust popular culture when it comes to biology. Trust science and scientists. They eat it and then probably think they are flying the Northern Lights. People take them too. You must be logged in to post a comment.

Sign in Join. Sign in. Log into your account. Referring back to reindeer names, the original Dutch reindeer lore has deer named Dunder and Blixem, meaning thunder and lightning, instead of Donner and Blitzen. Because reindeer live in the harshest of wintery tundras, they must migrate under sub-zero conditions.

To aid them in supporting their powerful bodies, they have dense arrays of capillaries in their noses, which sometimes appear pink.

This warm flow of blood warms the air they breathe in, keeping them from getting brain freezes while running. As for being able to see in blizzard conditions, reindeer have special eyes to aid them through the virtually sunless days of the Arctic. Reindeer have the ability to see ultraviolet light and are unaffected by snow-blindness.