African baobabs in the north of Kruger National Park have been found to survive up to 1,000 years or more. They are large and towering trees with a very unique morphology. Mostly growing alone instead of in groups, in the savanna, a solitary baobab is impossible to miss.
“It rises like a pillar out of the ground, and it has this huge canopy that forms a beautiful umbrella that can be very wide,” said Sarah Venter, a baobab ecologist and founder of the baobab foundation. And although she’s been studying and protecting baobabs for years, she’s still smitten by these giants.
“If you come to a baobab, it's almost like you've come to a cathedral, because you look up at it and it's this big, solid mass, and it just dominates your view. It's an incredibly awe-inspiring tree,” Venter said.
With a thick bulbous trunk and smooth knobby bark, baobabs are essential for ecosystem functioning. They’re so massive that a multitude of snakes, bats, birds, insects, lizards, and genets make them their home.
Their leaves are eaten by giraffes and caterpillars, their fruits and bark are eaten by elephants, the nectar in their night blooming flowers are consumed by bats, and their pollen is eaten by beetles. And that’s just a few examples of the roles of the adult trees. Seedlings are a different story.
“Young Baobab trees are very nutritious, and a lot of animals like to browse them and eat them, which means their survival is very low,” Venter said.
Normally, this isn’t a problem, but in reserves with rising mammal populations, it means more young baobabs get eaten and therefore less survive to adulthood. But even those adults aren’t safe.
“So elephants like to come up to baobab trees and strip all the bark off them and eat the bark, and sometimes the whole tree,” Venter said.
Again, in the past this wasn’t a problem as elephants would move on and the trees would recover. But as elephant populations grow in protected areas, it means more and more predation on adult baobabs.
“We are starting to lose adult baobab trees in the landscape, which has never happened before. Usually, adult tree mortality is incredibly low, but now it's rising,” Venter said.
This is especially concerning because of the age of these trees and their rate of loss. But there are solutions.
Venter and her team, have begun tree planting and stewardship campaigns to help young baobabs survive until they get large enough that smaller browsers can no longer reach their leaves. Elephants, though, require some form of deterrence to be kept at bay.
“Elephants don't like bees, and they don't like chili powder, they don't like chilies," Venter said. "So, people in the past have put beehives in baobab trees. They've put chili bags in baobab trees.”
But these methods didn’t work for long. Rains washed off chili powder, cold weather chased away the bees, and rocks and natural barriers were pushed away by the elephants themselves.
But that didn’t stop Venture and her team from continuing to look for something that would work. And thankfully, they came up with a solution.
“What we have found is wrapping the baobab trees in a wire mesh seems to protect them, for many, many years," Venter said. "Elephants don't like the feeling of the wire mesh on their trunk and on their tusks, and so they don't touch the trees.”
Since adult baobabs grow slowly, the mesh can last for decades. However, wire mesh is expensive and installing it requires lots of help.
To learn more about the process or how you can help, check out the Baobab Foundation.
