The first fish may have crawled onto land during Devonian times (350 million years ago) and probably did so, in response to drying swamps. This required that two problems must be overcome. How to move without the support of water and how to obtain oxygen from air rather than water. The mud skipper, another interesting…
Mangrove forests are wonderful places full of strange creatures adapted to this wet and muddy environment. There are two species of crab that live in this habitat with different but equally fascinating life styles. Fiddler crabs feed by sifting through the soft mud for bits of decaying organic matter, spitting out the inedible components and…
The African fish eagle (Haliaeetus vocifer)[2] or – to distinguish it from the true fish eagles (Ichthyophaga), the African sea eagle – is a large species of eagle that is found throughout sub-Saharan Africa wherever large bodies of open water occur that have an abundant food supply. It is the national bird of Zimbabwe, Zambia and South…
iSimangaliso Wetland Park (previously known as the Greater St. Lucia Wetland Park) is situated on the east coast of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, about 275 kilometres north of Durban. It is South Africa’s third-largest protected area, spanning 280 km of coastline, from the Mozambican border in the north to Mapelane south of the Lake St. Lucia…
Mangroves are various types of trees up to medium height and shrubs that grow in saline coastal sediment habitats in the tropics and subtropics – mainly between latitudes 25° N and 25° S. The remaining mangrove forest areas of the world in 2000 was 53,190 square miles (137,760 km²) spanning 118 countries and territories.[1][2] The word…
The hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius), or hippo, is a large, mostly herbivorous mammal in sub-Saharan Africa, and one of only two extant species in the family Hippopotamidae (the other is the pygmy hippopotamus). The name comes from the ancient Greek for “river horse” (ἱπποπόταμος). After the elephant and rhinoceros, the hippopotamus is the third-largest type of…