FEATURE ARTICLE
Water, Migration and the Serengeti Ecosystem
Understanding the mechanisms that control the timing of wildlife migrations may prove vital to successful management
Eric Wolanski, Emmanuel Gereta, Markus Borner, Simon Mduma
Managing Resources
The ability to predict the movement of more than a million animals across Serengeti National Park is far from an academic exercise. The park and its wildlife have been described as one of our planet's greatest treasures, yet its very size and diversity make its management a monumental task. With a model to predict the migration, wildlife managers will be able to separate uncontrollable effects on wildlife, such as rainfall variations, from effects that can be managed, such as fires, water impoundment and poaching. We have already developed a rainfall-driven model for the biomass of grass, wildebeests and carnivores that apparently reproduces observations from 1960 to 1998 quite faithfully. It may prove to be a vital tool for helping to manage an endangered and spectacular resource.
Finally, although the salinity model may be the most important outcome of our work, we propose that further work should be done on the effects of water quality on wildlife. Water as poor as we sampled in the park has had documented negative effects on cattle, yet essentially nothing is known about how such water may affect wildlife population dynamics. Indeed, 70 percent of the annual mortality of wildebeests occurs in the dry aseason as a result of unkown factors—definitely not poaching or predation but perhaps poor water quality. The current practice of storing water to encourage concentrated wildlife populations to please tourists may negatively impact those very animals. Furthermore, drinking water for wildlife in the dry season is increasingly threatened by waste from tourist lodges in the park, cattle in buffer zones around the park and siltation from erosion along tourist roads. We don't know how significant these influences are, but it may be vitally important that we find out.
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