The Astonishing Science Behind the Desert's Mysterious Fairy Circles
Enterprising tour guides have tried to fascinate tourists, saying the fairy circles are the marks of "dragon's breath" on the landscape.
According to Stuff, a new study by scientists Rob Pringle and Corina Tarnita, fellow ecologists at Princeton University, asserted that it's a little bit of both, Publishing their study's results in the journal Nature, Pringle explained that with a bit of computer modeling, both he and Tarnita discovered that the circles were a result of "complex interactions" between the termites and the grass that grows around them. It could have been a symbiotic relationship between the two.
Fairy circles as they call the bright orange, almost perfect circles of bare earth with edges of grass, have captivated both scientists and Himba tribesmen living at the Namib Desert of northern Namibia. The Himba tribesmen have traditionally called them "footprints of the Gods" for ages, reported The Smithsonian.
Some scientists theorized that the circles are caused by termites eating at the top layer of grass so that the little water that falls down on the desert can filter down to their burrows beneath the grass. Other researchers asserted that it's a feedback system of plants which learned to assume order in the desert.
Pringle asserted that he didn't start out observing the fairy circles but was studying the ecosystems of termite mounds. He was fascinated with a study of another scientist, Norbert Juergens, stating that the fairy circles were caused by sand termites that live almost in each one of the circles. These termites cleared the grass high above their nests so that the little rainwater that fell on them could be absorbed down below.
On the other hand, the plant theory was propounded by Cornita, who said that the clumps of grass around the circles was a self-organizing behavior of the plants to expand across a vast ecosystem and eventually developed order with this pattern.
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