Most of the time we were in Africa, we were traveling through savannah, endless grasslands with occasional trees and bushes.
It is thought that humans first lived in a savannah environment and that that is probably why we build our parks to have open grassy areas with trees and bushes scattered about. We feel more at home, more at ease, in such an environment because that is where our ancestors first lived.
Savannah view
Taragire
(Click on any image to enlarge it)
The savannahs of Africa support enormous numbers of animals (elephants, antelopes, giraffes, warthogs, zebras, etc.) who live by eating the grasses and bushes and trees. The plants have adapted to being eaten by making themselves less and less attractive to eat. Many of the bushes and trees, for example, have developed thorns. The big white thorns on this little acacia tree are very typical.
Acacia thorns
Lake Nakuru
The animals have responded by evolving ways of dealing with all these thorns. Giraffes have adapted by having very hard mouths that can endure chomping down on thorns as terrible as these.
Also, by having such long necks, giraffes can reach the tops of trees, where the growths are more tender. (Elephants, on the other hand, reach the tender growths at the tops of the trees by simply pushing the trees over; that's one of the reasons they have needed to become so big and strong.)
Giraffes eating thorns
Nairobi National Park
We primates have taken a different approach, of course. Instead of adapting by becoming big and strong or by evolving specialized body parts, such as a long neck and a hard mouth, we have specialized in becoming more and more clever.
A very charming primate of the savannah is the Vervet Monkey, a small monkey that lives in the dry grassland and eats the plants it finds there (when it can't get candy bars by raiding the hotel rooms of visitors). The Vervets take an entirely different approach to dealing with those big white thorns.
I wish I had a video of this Vervet to show you. We watched him for several minutes. What he did was use his delicate hands to break off one of the big thorns (carefully avoiding being stuck). Once he had the thorn broken off, he put the open end in his mouth and sucked out the green leaf rolled up inside the thorn. He was very adept at doing this and could eat several thorns in a minute, thereby defeating all the effort the plant had put into producing the thorns to protect itself from being eaten.
Vervet eating thorns
Ngorongoro Crater
