A Place like No Other

Discovering the Secrets of Serengeti

Anthony R. E. Sinclair, René Beyers

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691222349
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Biology
• Index: Biological Sciences

From famed zoologist Anthony Sinclair, an account of his decades-long quest to understand one of Earth's most spectacular ecosystems With its rich biodiversity, astounding wildlife, and breathtaking animal migrations, Serengeti is like no other ecosystem on the planet. A Place like No Other is Anthony Sinclair's firsthand account of how he and other scientists discovered the biological principles that regulate life in Serengeti and how they rule all of the natural world.When Sinclair first began studying this spectacular ecosystem in 1965, a host of questions confronted him. What environmental features make its annual migration possible? What determines the size of animal populations and the stunning diversity of species? What factors enable Serengeti to endure over time? In the five decades that followed, Sinclair and others sought answers. What they learned is that seven principles of regulation govern all natural processes in the Serengeti ecosystem. Sinclair shows how these principles can help us to understand and overcome the challenges facing Serengeti today, and how they can be used to repair damaged habitats throughout the world.Blending vivid storytelling with invaluable scientific insights from Sinclair's pioneering fieldwork in Africa, A Place like No Other reveals how Serengeti holds timely lessons for the restoration and conservation of our vital ecosystems.

1

Why Serengeti?

A WORLD HERITAGE

In 1972, the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, in Stockholm, developed the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage.¹ Later in 1972, former US Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, a passionate advocate for the environment, who also served as US representative to the Stockholm conference, visited Serengeti. I met him there, took him around the park, and discussed the future. He recounted the events in Stockholm earlier that year: a debate had developed over how to choose World Heritage sites. As a first attempt, delegates were asked to retire for the evening and draw up a list of their top 10 preferred sites around the world. Next day all the lists were collated, and the one with most votes, the top of the list, was the Serengeti ecosystem. It was voted the most important natural area in the world.

Serengeti is outstanding for its biodiversity, its great migrations, and its iconic megafauna of large mammals. It is one of the last remaining relatively intact examples in the modern world of the last Ice Age, or Pleistocene. Why is Serengeti so different from any other place? Why is it regarded as the most important natural ecosystem in the world? All heritage sites are unique in their own ways, so why does this one stand out? We know from paleontology that the main aspects of Serengeti have been around for a long time, some four million years at least.² There must be a set of conditions and processes that create special features of Serengeti and that result in its persistence over long periods. Over the past 50 years or so, a group of scientists has worked to elucidate these processes, which are governed by what we have termed principles. What makes Serengeti both outstanding and spectacular? What are the environmental features that allow a migration of so many animals? What determines the sizes of animal populations and the diversity of species that live there? Indeed, why does it have so many species? These are some of the questions we will consider here as we explore the biology of Serengeti. Using these principles, we can understand the problems facing Serengeti today, and what might happen to it in the future. These principles will also allow us to understand how problems in other areas of the world have developed and, finally, how we can repair them.

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The Serengeti is defined by the area across which the wildebeest migrate. Serengeti is now a household name, the epitome of a wildlife spectacle in Pleistocene surroundings. Surprisingly, it has only recently come to be known thus. It was the lions that first attracted attention, in the 1920s—lions to be hunted by foreigners—and the wildebeest migration was completely unknown. The Serengeti plains were the place to go for the grandest black-maned lions in the world, and there were lots of them to shoot. It was not until the Germans Bernhard Grzimek and his son, Michael, flew their plane over the Serengeti in the late 1950s to document the great migration in their film (and book of the same name) Serengeti Shall Not Die that the world first became aware of the phenomenon.³ The Serengeti is significant because it supports one of the last remaining migrations of large mammals in a relatively unchanged state from the time of the hunter-gatherers, long before the agricultural development that gradually emerged in the 1600s from the Congo, far outside Serengeti, and before the impacts of the modern economic world were felt. It is also a place of singular beauty and remarkable biodiversity: it supports more large mammal species than any other place in the world, and almost as many bird species as the whole of Europe. Despite its relatively undisturbed state, the ecology of the Serengeti has changed over the past century, and these changes highlight its fragility and sensitivity to climate and human impacts.

Serengeti is a place where biologists can observe nature more easily than most. Its combination of open plains and savanna allows access to most of the area. The large animals are readily observable. One can describe their ecology and behavior using only binoculars. Their populations can be counted accurately. Because of the many decades biologists have been studying the Serengeti, we now understand the causes underlying the huge changes that occurred in the ecosystem both in the distant past and during the past century. By now nearly everyone knows that human impacts on nature are becoming ever more severe, and Serengeti has become a case study documenting these impacts. Long-term studies have shown how political, economic, and social events have driven the ecological changes.⁴ Serengeti has become a vital source of information for science on how ecosystems work and how they respond to pressures.

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My involvement in Serengeti began on July 1, 1965, driving south from Nairobi through the Maasai Mara Park to Banagi, the research headquarters of a small band of biologists in the center of Serengeti National Park. My job was to record the bird migrations from Asia, as an assistant to Professor A. J. Cain of Oxford University. He had projects elsewhere in Africa and left me to it for three months. I was given a small roundhouse to live in. My first morning, at dawn, I accompanied the park warden’s driver while he read all the rain gauges scattered around the park, a job that was done at the end of each month. It was the first of three days of rain-gauge reading, and in that time we covered the whole of Serengeti, some 20,000 square kilometers.

At the end of those three days, I had seen the Serengeti as few nonnatives had ever done. In the past I had seen something of East Africa, having been raised there, and had visited various game parks. But nothing had prepared me for this experience of wildlife in vast numbers, the extraordinary migrations, the sheer diversity of animals and vegetation, and the spectacular landscapes. There had to be a reason why Serengeti was such an outstanding place, and I decided to find out, to discover the conditions, the processes and underlying principles that made Serengeti the way it is. But this system, though unique, shares many features with other ecosystems in the world, making it a model for understanding ecological processes.

The principles are useful not just to explain how Serengeti itself works, in its unusual, even aberrant form. In understanding this ecosystem, we can begin to make sense of all other systems by recognizing how they differ from Serengeti; they are the other side of the coin. This book recounts the history of how these principles were discovered.

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Perhaps the best way to begin is with a brief description of the Serengeti ecosystem. Its special geographic features determine its physical environment, climate, water relations, and habitats. Together, these create the conditions that make possible the great migration of wildebeest and other species.

The Serengeti-Mara ecosystem is an area of approximately 25,000 square kilometers on the border of Tanzania and Kenya in East Africa, and its extent is defined by the movements of the migratory wildebeest. This includes many political administrations. The main ones in Tanzania are the Serengeti National Park (SNP) itself, and the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA), which lies east of the park and includes half of the Serengeti plains. North of the NCA is the district of Loliondo. The Maasai Mara Reserve is the main Kenyan administration. This area holds the vital dry-season grazing and water supplies for the migration. South and west of SNP are small game reserves, such as Maswa, Grumeti, and Ikorongo (figure 1.1).

Most of the ecosystem consists of a flat or rolling landscape highly dissected by small seasonal streams that flow into a few major rivers. It is part of the high plateau of interior East Africa. This gentle aspect slopes from the edge of the Gregory Rift in the east down to Lake Victoria in the west, so that all the rivers (except the Olduvai, on the plains) flow west. The highest part of the plains is at an altitude of 1,800 meters, while Speke Gulf in the west is at 1,200 meters.

FIGURE 1.1. The main administrative areas and place names in the Serengeti Ecosystem. NP = National Park, GR = Game Reserve, CA = Conservation Area, GCA = Game Controlled Area, GP = Guard Post.

There are three major rivers, the most important being the Mara, which originates in the montane forests of the Mau Highlands of Kenya. It has until recently flowed year round (see chapter 12), providing the main water supply for the great herds of migrating animals in the dry season. It flows through the Mara Reserve of Kenya and northern Serengeti, and eventually flows west through the huge Musiara swamp into Lake Victoria at Musoma. The two other rivers are the Grumeti, which originates in the highlands of northeastern Serengeti, and the Mbalageti, which originates on the Serengeti plains. Both are seasonal rivers with only pools remaining in the dry season. Two more rivers originate in southern Serengeti, the Simiyu and the Duma, but only their upper reaches lie within the Serengeti before they flow through agricultural land to Speke Gulf. All other rivers dry out except for a few springs that seep from the base of hills.

Steep, rocky hills occur along the eastern boundary of SNP and between the Grumeti and Mbalageti rivers in the west, forming a backbone to the corridor between the rivers. The Nyaraboro Plateau, with a high (300-meter) escarpment, occurs in the southwest. Because of the generally higher elevation in the east, the hills in Loliondo and the northeast of SNP reach 2,000 meters.

The ecosystem is effectively self-contained, enclosed by natural boundaries on all but one side. The eastern boundary is formed by the escarpment of the Gregory Rift and the base of the Crater Highlands. The south is bounded by the edge of the Serengeti plains and in Maswa by the appearance of numerous kopjes (rocky outcrops). In the west, the corridor, which is largely an alluvial plain formed by the rivers, is bounded on both its south and north by higher ground—now agricultural land—and by Speke Gulf. The west side of the northern extension of Serengeti to the Kenya border is an artificial boundary set by agriculture. Within Kenya, the Mara Reserve is bounded by the Isuria escarpment, the Loita plains, and the Loita hills (figure 1.2).

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The Serengeti ecosystem is (very roughly) a square, with the treeless plains covering the bottom right quarter, about 5,000 square kilometers. They were formed by dust deposits from the volcanoes of the Crater Highlands 4 million years ago. To understand how this happened, we have to go back to the Miocene, some 14 million years ago, when eastern Africa began to split apart due to plate tectonics—the same process that split Africa from South America starting 100 million years ago. Africa is still breaking apart and in a few million years will be two continents. The split is developing down a rift, the Great Rift Valley, from the Dead Sea in the Near East through Ethiopia to East Africa. In East Africa this rift splits into two arms (figure 1.3). The western arm, called the Albertine Rift, runs along the western borders of Uganda, Tanzania, and Mozambique. Within it lie the deep lakes Albert, Tanganyika, and Malawi. The eastern arm, the Gregory Rift, runs through the middle of Kenya and Tanzania. The edges of each rift are uplifted so that the land between the two forms a shallow basin. Lake Victoria is impounded in this basin, essentially a vast and shallow puddle only about 65 meters deep at its greatest depth. At 65,000 square kilometers, it is huge, the largest lake in Africa and the third largest in the world after Lake Superior and the Caspian Sea (which is in fact a lake). It is some 200 kilometers across both west and north.

FIGURE 1.2. Topography and habitats of the Serengeti ecosystem.

FIGURE 1.3. The rif...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Why Serengeti?
• 2. The Discovery of Rinderpest
• 3. Finding Regulation
• 4. The Discovery of Food Regulation
• 5. How Predators Regulate Prey
• 6. How Migration Structures Serengeti
• 7. Biodiversity and the Regulation of Ecosystems
• 8. Disturbance and the Persistence of Ecosystems
• 9. Continuous Change in Ecosystems
• 10. Appearance of Multiple States and Rapid Shifts in Ecosystems
• 11. The Fundamental Principle of Regulation, and Future Directions
• 12. Threats to the Serengeti
• 13. Lessons from the Serengeti
• 14. Rewilding
• Appendix: Mammals and Trees Mentioned in the Text
• Notes
• Index