Page 33 - Kyalami issue 4 2021

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NATURE
iving, as most of us do, on There’s a marvellous picture
the high inland plateau of of weevils doing this in Barry
Southern Africa, what do we Lovegrove’s The Living Deserts
Lconsider a good rainfall? of Southern Africa. The book is a
A summer storm can often bring greatly expanded revision of his
20mm of rain in an hour. That’s 1993 bestseller of the same title.
good. We often experience twice Lovegrove, an evolutionary
that, even three times more.
physiologist, writes with an easy
But consider this: in the dry half style and is unafraid of emotion
of South Africa, 20mm is as much or offering forthright views. He
as people expect in a year. Some, writes as a lover of desert life and
in the far west, record as little as describes how our barren wastes
5mm a year. teem with life just as varied
and species-rich as our coastal
How do the animals and plants forests. The diversity of creatures
survive? Call it evolutionary in these arid regions varies from
ingenuity. Some, for instance, tap ants to elephants. The birdlife is
the nightly fogs coming in from amazing and there are thousands
the cold Atlantic. The fogs roll of species of plants – hundreds
eastwards only to evaporate at found nowhere else in the world.
sunrise. There are beetles that Each living thing has its ingenious
cling upside down to leaf stems way of surviving the searing
allowing the fog to condense on the temperatures and the rainless
surfaces of their hard-shelled outer months.
wings. The droplets accumulate
and trickle down to their heads and Lovegrove has forebodings
mouth parts. regarding climate change and

OUR LIVING DESERTS

B Y J AMES CLARKE

Kyalami Estates • CONNECT • Issue 4 • 2021 31