A deeper understanding of wild Africa

To truly appreciate wild Africa, we must adapt a different way of seeing. The whole is often much greater than the sum of its parts. So instead of seeing the animals and plants that make up the ecosystem individually we should seek to understand and visualise the web of interactions and relationships that make up the ecosystem.

Whether on a Kenya safari or in Kruger national park in South Africa, instead of looking at wild Africa through our binoculars and magnifying glasses we should seek rather to float above the earth on an imaginary balloon and appreciate the landscape in its entirety rather than in bits.

When ecologists use the word landscape they often use it in reference to the climate, soil, vegetation, animals and topography that forms an interacting unit.

Landscapes have spatial dimensions including the dimension of time. Just like in an art form or in language involving the construction of sentences, the position of parts in relation to one another is crucial in determining the outcome.

Often where an organism is found gives a vital clue as to why it is found there. The time dimension is equally essential because everything we see in a landscape has a history, like a legion of shadowy ghosts matching behind it.

Over the years the African continent has allowed the evolution and maintenance of unusually diverse plant and animal species, intricately adapted to each other and to their environment.

Just as the shape and height of a building are determined by its foundations, so does the soil set the limits of form and function of an ecosystem.

Herbivore numbers are limited not by the total amount of plant material produced by the ecosystem but by the quality of nutritious, palatable and accessible food. Grazer numbers are limited by the quality of grass (In particular the nitogen content), while browser numbers are limited by the quality of available and edible material during the critical dry seasons when most trees have shade their leaves.

It seems self-evident that the number of predators has a direct impact on the prey population, but the reality is a little more complicated. Other factors also play a role including preference of predators for particular types of prey.

Predator preferences are partly influenced by the ease with which the different species can be captured, the size of the meal and also partly due to learned behaviour.

Individual predators tend to specialize on just a few species of prey usually the ones that were the main part of their diet when they were learning to hunt.