A walk in the Karoo

 Yesterday morning Angie and I got up very early to take a tour of a very particular part of South Africa. 

There are large areas of scrubby but very distinctive semi-desert landscapes in the country and two of them are called the Great Karoo (Groot Karoo) and the Small Karoo (Klein Karoo), but if I tell you that even the Klein is 350km long you will see that the names are quite relative. 

I think we were just on the Southern side of the Groot Karoo in a town called Prince Albert and our host, Sue, has had a small section of Karoo - I think 50 hectares - for 20 years and has maintained it as a nature reserve that whole time. It is especially interesting because it is a desert which supports a wide range of succulent plants.

As she took us round she showed us and explained to us all the different means by which plants stay alive in such a dry and hot environment. Many of the succulents find their niche in the shade of other plants, and grow slowly there. Here's one of them. 

Sue mentioned  that eventually the shade plants suck up all the water and kill their hosts, a form of slow suicide for the shade plants. Most of the plants have waxy leaves to retain water, and most of the plants are very slow growing. Sue showed us one about the size of a dinner plate, which she told us was about 60 years old. 

Some plants secrete poisons to make them inedible to sheep and other mammals. The plant below has plenty of water in its leaves, but it is salty, as we found out. 

There is also a plant in the picture below, but you'd never know. It is the pair of grey semicircles in the middle. It is a lithops. It retains moisture by staying very low and unnoticeable. These strange plants are so prized by collectors that Sue has motion-sensing cameras to detect nighttime poachers!

Sue was also hugely knowledgeable about the whole landscape, from geology to climate to archaeology. She showed us a 3000 year old site from the Khoi people where the flora has still not reverted to its original state. So what mark are we leaving on it?

And the unexpected heroes of the whole show turn out to be the termites. They toil heroically, with specialised hard-shelled surface workers gathering sticks and grass in ten minute bursts  to feed back into the huge 'termitarium' underground. This can be 7m wide and 40,000 years old and contain god knows what number of termites (until an Aardvark or porcupine comes crashing in). In passing we learned that farmers dislike aardvarks as they can undermine a farm road with suspension-demolishing results. 

But I finish with another gift from the termites: a handful of nutrient-rich termite dung. So even with a huge range of specialist niche-finders, it is the humble termite that keeps it all rolling.