![]() ![]() As recently as last year, scientists finally got an insight into the thousands of mysterious mounds carpeting the Llanos plains around the Orinoco River in Colombia and Venezuela. However familiar this habitat may seem, the planet’s grasslands still hold secrets waiting to be discovered. There are even reports of both brown falcons and black kites picking up burning branches to start new fires to flush out their prey. They make hay while the pyre blazes, and catch birds and small mammals as they flee the flames. With this facial cutlery set they can shovel up to 300kg of vegetation into their mouths each day that’s around four times the weight of your average Brit. The elephant’s iconic trunk can weigh 200kg, but finger-like protrusions on its tip are so dainty that they can pluck a single blade of grass from the ground. Incidentally, it’s not just dung-beetles that get involved people put this to various uses too, including repelling mosquitoes, making paper, producing prize-winning artworks and even brewing beer!Īll that defecation is powered by a lot of eating. An adult elephant can produce over 70kg of dung daily. One of the plains’ most forthcoming providers is the African elephant. Shifting biblical amounts of poop is all very well, but the world’s dung beetles would be up the proverbial creek if they weren’t supplied with fresh fodder every day. It wasn’t until bovine-specific beetles were imported that the pastures were able to return to some sort of normality. Dung piled up, biting fly populations boomed, and pasture began to wilt, starved of light and nutrients. The local dung beetle, partial to marsupial faeces, was simply not interested in the pats of imported cows. This fact became abundantly clear to Australian cattle farmers in the 1960s. But dung beetles are picky, and won’t tuck in to just any old pooey morsel. ![]() What most of them have in common is their taste for droppings, usually of herbivores, as these contain plenty of undigested vegetable matter. There are some 8000 species of dung beetle around the globe, and they are found on every continent except Antarctica. And through the tireless efforts of specialist recyclers known as dung beetles, this rich fertiliser gets spread out and buried, returning these nutrients to new-growth grass ready for the grazers. Herbivores that feed on grasses produce an astronomical amount of excrement- excrement that is still rich in undigested nutrients. There is one key ingredient that makes this limbo-land productive and that ingredient is a load of crap. ![]() Even the Sahara enjoyed a brief spell as verdant grassland around 10,000 years ago, when a rainier climate meant that giraffes, rhinos, and even humans moved in. When an ecosystem lacks sufficient water or nutrients to support high-maintenance forests, grass comes into its own. So what makes this habitat tick? In short, grasslands are nature’s halfway house. Recent studies have found that our key human traits of bipedalism, large brains, flexible diets and complex social structures may have evolved as tricks to survive in newly colonised open grasslands. Even the biggest land animal ever was a grasslander: the Indricotherium was a 20 tonne hornless rhino who stood some 5 metres tall, and roamed plains that stretched from Europe to China 30 million years ago.Īnother animal that owes a debt to the grasslands is Homo sapiens: that’s us. Elasmotheriums were enormous rhinos endowed with 6-foot horns, that grazed steppe grasses alongside mighty woolly mammoths. Go back a few millennia, and even then grasslands were home to the big players. Think 270kg lions perfectly camouflaged against the dry African savannah, hairy battalions of bison roving the prairies, or herds of wildebeest wandering the Serengeti in their millions. For a start, grasslands are the stage for a real A-list cast. ![]()
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