A long list of residents
Chacma baboons, samango monkeys, dassies, mongoose meerkats, jackals, spotted hyenas and wild dogs, as well as rare turtles and chameleons, and more than 100 species of snakes, including the highly venomous black mambas, green mambas, cobras and boomslangs: the list goes on. South Africa has over 200 species of mammals and 77,000 species of invertebrates. As for birds, there are 850 species of which 725 are resident, the others are migratory birds that take up residence in summer.
Land of safaris
In South Africa, we go on a game drive. Another name given to safari, it is a walk in the parks and reserves to meet the animals. On board a car, a 4 x 4 or even on foot with armed rangers - just in case -, we observe the inhabitants of the savannah wandering in their natural element. Who will we meet in these fabulous landscapes? First of all, the so-called "Big Five": lion, elephant, buffalo, rhinoceros and leopard. These are the five most difficult animals to see, but which were in colonial times the five most dangerous animals to hunt. In addition, there are a multitude of animals that live in the same habitat: cheetah, giraffe, wildebeest, zebra, warthog, meerkat, jackal, kudu, impala, redbok, gemsbok, and of course the famous springbok.
Too many elephants in Kruger?
While there are many places in the world where elephants are disappearing, in the Kruger Park, on the contrary, entire families populate the park. Each year, the elephant population grows by 7% in Kruger Park, where the pachyderms coexist with large populations of other species, in an environment rich in plant and tree varieties, which are also protected. Are there too many elephants then? The elephants, with their natural overweight, break and destroy all the trees in their path. Since the park stopped culling in 1994, at the current rate, the population of the Kruger is expected to grow to about 20,000 in the next few decades. Unable to cope with the logistics or the very high costs, other solutions such as contraception are being considered. More naturally, the creation of a cross-border park between Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe has been established over the years. The latter, allowing their migration, helps regulate the elephant population in the park.
The springbok, national animal
The characteristic of this species of antelope is the jump, called pronk. The springbok, which reaches 75 cm in height and weighs about 40 kg, jumps up to 4 m in height and 15 m in length. This species is adapted to dry and bare areas, as well as to open grassy plains. For this reason, it is mainly found in the Free State, the North-West and in the Karoo up to the west coast. They are gregarious animals, moving in small herds in winter, but often congregating in larger numbers in the summer months.
The resurrected quagga!
It was thought that the last quagga had died in an Amsterdam zoo in 1883 and that the species was definitely extinct. Except that, more than one hundred and thirty years after its extinction, science has achieved a real feat by making it reappear!
The quagga looks like a zebra, but without the stripes: black and white stripes from the muzzle to the middle of the belly like a traditional zebra, but with a beige-brown rump without any stripes. The animal was very popular with the wealthy notables of the colonial era. Even Louis XVI was particularly proud of the quaggas he had in his menagerie at the Palace of Versailles. Because of its notoriety and fragility, this subspecies of zebra had officially disappeared in the 19th century, totally exterminated by European hunters of the colonial era who fed on their meat and used their skin for clothing and accessories.
However, since 2011, these mammals have been seen again in a valley just two hours north of Cape Town, at the foot of the rugged Western Cape Mountains, in the Riebeek Valley. Indeed, a project called the "Quagga Project" - www.quaggaproject.org - was initiated by scientists in the 1980s who, after having quagga skin samples analyzed at the South African Museum in Cape Town, discovered that the DNA of this animal was the same as that of the plains zebra, except for some stripes. Since the two animals are very close genetically, it was possible to reconstruct the missing DNA sequences of the quagga from its cousin. A miracle of science and nature, the fifth generation is in every way similar to the original quagga! In 2017, about ten of the hundred animals in the Table Mountain Park Reserve could claim the name quagga.
At a time when we are more accustomed to hearing about species extinction and environmental destruction, we can only rejoice to learn that, in the near future, quaggas will once again repopulate the South African plains as they did before the arrival of the first settlers several centuries ago.
Lovers of coasts and sea beds
At the meeting point of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, bathed by numerous rivers, South Africa has 16% of the world's fish species, or 2,000. Off its coasts, especially on the Overberg and Cape Peninsula, live imposing marine mammals such as seals, penguins, whales and dolphins. As for the famous sharks, admired and feared at the same time, they are present on all the coasts. Giant turtles migrate to the northeast of the country during the egg-laying season.
From the whale family
Within the cetacean family, we distinguish between baleen whales, commonly called "right" whales by hunters for their high blubber content, and toothed whales, which include orcas and dolphins. Right whales were decimated in the 18th and 19th centuries until their near extinction in the 1960s, especially southern right whales and humpback whales, which are still vulnerable today. They feed mainly on plankton, a small crustacean, the krill, but also on small fish and sometimes squid. They can be observed from June to January on the coasts of Southern Africa, during the mating season and the birth of their young, especially in Hemanus and along the Garden Route.
A hundred species of shark
The South African coastline is frequented by about a hundred species of sharks. South Africa holds with Australia and France, in Reunion Island, the record of attacks. The external reefs and the passes where the waves are formed that interest surfers are the favorite pantry of sharks. We can also mention the turbid waters found in ports, estuaries near agri-food complexes that discharge their waste into the sea or the turbid waters of the coastline after a storm. Only five species are considered dangerous due to their size and diet: the tiger shark(Galeocerdo cuvieri), the white shark(Carcharodon carcharias), the bull shark(Carcharhinus leucas), the mako shark(Isurus oxyrinchus) and the longfin shark(Carcharhinus longimanus). It is interesting to note that the sharks seen during shark cage diving are different if you dive in the Durban area or in the Cape region. Among these species, the white shark is the only current representative of the genus carcharodon, immortalized by the cult movie Jaws. It can be approached by diving in a cage. It measures on average from 3 to 5 m long and weighs between 680 kg and 1 t. Its teeth, sharp as razor blades, can grow back four to six times. The jaws measure 90 cm wide for a 6 m specimen. It seems that these animals make very long journeys. In 2005, a female great white shark, which was equipped with a tracking sensor, crossed the Indian Ocean from Cape Town to the southern coast of Australia and back, a journey of nearly 10,000 km in less than nine months.
Gigantic nursery land
One tenth of the world's plants grow in South Africa, that is to say 22,000 to 24,000 different species according to botanists. This diversity is due to a great disparity of climates. Thus, the savannah plains, the mountains, the desert areas, the tropical regions and the Cape region, with its Mediterranean climate, are home to totally different varieties. This last region is the only "floral region" in the world, out of six in total, contained in one country. The Cape's biodiversity is a Unesco World Heritage Site. In this region of 553,000 ha, approximately the size of Portugal, there are 9,600 species of plants, of which 2,285 grow in the 471 km² peninsula alone, the size of London, and 5,000 exist nowhere else in the world. There are 600 plants related to the heather family. The fynbos scrub, from the Dutch fijnbosch, covers half of the Cape Floristic Region, but contributes 86% of the total species. In September, walkers look for the famous Disa uniflora on Table Mountain, one of the 500 species of orchids in the country. In spring, Namaqualand is covered with an infinite number of colorful flowers, among which the famous prota. This diversity is however threatened. About 30 species of plants have already disappeared and 1,406 are endangered.
Protea cynaroides, "national" flower
Proteus: "A deity of the sea who, when seized asleep to predict the future, sought to escape by assuming all sorts of frightening forms" (dictionnaire Littré). The king moth, or giant moth, is widely distributed in the southwestern and southern areas of the Cape Province, from the Cederberg up east of Grahamstown. The royal protaea owes its specific name "cinaroid", which means "like cynara" (artichoke), to its resemblance to the artichoke. This name does not do justice to the beauty of the flowers of this protaea, the largest of its kind. It presents a great diversity of colors and forms of the leaves, but the most beautiful among the 115 species is the pink color flower.
