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In the remote Namibian grasslands, visitors come not to see the grazing zebra and oryx but instead a longstanding ecological mystery: barren patches of ground known as fairy circles. These formations, 30 to 100 feet in diameter and ringed with grasses, form a striking, repeating pattern across hundreds of miles of the arid landscape. The fairy circles are long-lived, persisting 30 to 60 years. And no one is sure how they got there.
Now, a team at CU Boulder is working to understand this ecological curiosity. Recently, scientists Lauren Shoemaker, Nichole Barger and Holly Barnard returned from a two-week trip to Namibia to follow up on a field study that launched in 2015. Using a combination of experiments and computer modeling, they hope to answer how the circles are created as well as how they persist for decades. Their work might not only explain this mystery, but also has many implications for agriculture and ecology across the arid regions of the continent.
Over the years, many ideas have been proposed for how these circles form. The legends of the local Himba people describe them as footprints of the gods. Among scientists, some of the proposed causes include plant competition, termites and underground gases. But experimental evidence is scant, because of the fairy circles’ remote location in the Namib desert, hours from gas stations and grocery stores and reachable only by driving off road through sandy dunes.
“When you get something so striking visually to humans, there’s a tendency to try to explain it with other mechanisms—something other than the principles that we’re taught,” said Barger, a professor in CU Boulder’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. “What our group brings is that we’re trained as ecologists and environmental scientists, and we just went to the principles of how ecosystems work, and didn’t let how cool [fairy circles] were distract us from that.”
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Photo via University of Colorado – Boulder.
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