Why does wildlife thrive on the serengeti plain

Last but not least, a percentage of park revenues is used to assist community development initiatives, such as schools, health dispensaries, water schemes and roads. Regular surveys are undertaken to monitor the distribution and numbers of animals, test water quality, identify disease outbreaks, and check invasion by exotic species. By providing study materials, teacher training for schools and showing conservation videos in the Swahili language in villages, TANAPA is taking the lead in educating local people.

In addition, schools and community groups are offered free visits to the parks to demonstrate the importance of preserving these habitats. Tanzania National Parks TANAPA is also currently acquiring further land to expand certain parks, and to raise the status of traditional migration corridors connecting protected areas.

Including other reserves, conservation areas and marine parks, Tanzania has accorded some form of formal protection to more than one-third of its territory. They have the following focal points: Sustainable tourism TANAPA is committed to low impact, sustainable visitation to protect the environment from irreversible damage while creating a first class ecotourism destination.

I chose Discover Africa for a tented camp Safari to accommodate my family of 5. We wanted the trip to the Serengeti to coincide with the Great Migration. George Plimpton and Henry Kissinger were fellow grads of Harvard.

More important to me, en route to my work in Burma, I would meet Nobel Laureates Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz, who along with Carl von Frisch were the founders of ethology-the study of animal behaviour. They were not associated with Harvard but I had the opportunity to spend a summer at the Max Planck Institute for Behavioural Physiology in Bavaria and studied with Lorenz, and met other influential biologists including Ernst Mayr and von Frisch. In , you travelled to Burma [Myanmar] to conduct a wildlife survey.

What was that experience like. The field experience was very helpful, though the animals were quite different. However, the great diversity of animals there fascinated me. Do you recall any adventures in Burma? One day I was sitting at a waterhole and sensed that a tiger was circling me.

I still have the teapot from a different person's neighbouring camp that was upended by a tiger who jumped over a log, picked up a person in its mouth, and ran into the forest with him.

Thankfully, no. In we ran into food shortages in Tanzania because of the war with Uganda, but the country itself was calm. Are they still as popular as they once were? The two books are currently being used to train safari guides throughout Africa. How did the idea of the rare species conservatory foundation come about and what have been some of its accomplishments?

Paul Reillo founded it. He has been protecting rare species of all sorts, especially birds, I was a founding board member. Our daughter Anna and son Lyndon are associates, too. Then, in May as the plains of the south and east dry out the mass moves on to the north and west crossing the Grumeti River, where there is more grass and more a more reliable water supply. Some , wildebeest die during the journey from Tanzania to Maasai Mara Reserve in lower Kenya, a total of miles km , according to the World Wildlife Fund for Nature.

Death is usually from thirst, hunger, exhaustion, or predation. And some wildebeest drown. An average of 6, wildebeest die every year crossing the Mara River in eastern Africa during this annual migration. And scientists have found their deaths weren't for naught. Reporting online June 19, in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , researchers looked at 13 mass drownings that occurred between and , finding that the thousands of corpses are the equivalent of more than 1, tons of biomass that can feed the Serengeti.

Animals that benefit include scavengers like vultures and crocodiles, as well as maggots and even fish and algae that benefit from the nutrients released from the wildebeests' bones. To peer into the secret lives of this diverse array of animals that call the Serengeti home, Alexandra Swanson began placing motion-triggered cameras, or camera traps, around the Serengeti in as part of her doctoral dissertation at the University of Minnesota.

With the help of citizen scientists, Swanson and other researchers identified the species in any images showing animals. She described the resulting 1. Images like these can help to answer questions about how animals interact in various ecosystems, the researchers said.