Water Pans - the difference between life and death for African safari wildlife

Nature provides for the formation of “pans” of water in many spectacular ways of which two are particularly fascinating, dust devils and ants.

The Karoo, in South Africa, is a semi desert region and has a pan belt. There are hollows in the plains and during the rainy season, they keep filling up with water and this water eventually soaks into the ground and becomes mud. The mud dries into dust at the bottom of the hollow in the dry season and appears very white as it has concentrated minerals in it.

The air above this whitened area becomes extremely hot and starts to rise, forming a spiral and picking up the dust then moving off across the plain as dust devils do.  When it loses its strength and collapses, the dust falls back onto the plain, away from the hollow. With repetition, over the years, a pan is born due to the deepening and widening of the hollow through removal of dust. So nature gives birth to a dust devil in order to assist in the creation of a pan, truly amazing!

All animals love salt and lime and wherever these appear on the surface, browsers, especially such as elephant, eland, oryx, kudu, giraffe and rhino, are attracted to these salt “licks”.

Ants play a very important part in bringing these salt deposits up to the surface because they create ant-heaps with the soil they bring up from far below. The animals are attracted to the ant-heaps and eat the soil in order to get the lime.  The area surrounding the ant-heap gets trampled to dust, which in turn gets blown away by the wind and a hollow is formed. When it rains, the hollow that has formed fills with water and lime from the surrounding surface, becoming a pool.  The animals drink the water and by tramping the floor of the pool, they firm it into a leak-proof seal.  So from a hollow to a small pool which heavy rains swell into larger pans and even become small shallow lakes in some places, all engineered by industrious ants.

These pans are enlarged in the following amazing way:-
When the water level is low an elephant drinking 250l of water would be carrying away in its stomach, at least 25 kg of soil and in one year, one elephant might remove 5 tons of soil just by drinking and then there is still the mud it carries out on its feet and body when it has finished wallowing. The more lime in the water the greater the attraction for animals and a herd of several hundred buffalo, after just one visit to a pan, significantly change the size of a pan.

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