The Serengeti
The Serengeti is a vast ecosystem in east-central Africa. It spans 12,000 square miles (30,000 square kilometers), according to NASA, giving rise to its name, which is derived from the Maasai language and means “endless plains.”
This region of Africa is located in north Tanzania and extends to southwestern Kenya. The Serengeti encompasses Serengeti National Park and a number of protected game reserves and conservation areas maintained by the governments of Tanzania and Kenya. The region hosts the largest mammal migration in the world and is a popular destination for African safaris.
Altitudes in the Serengeti range from 3,020 feet to 6,070 feet (920 meters to 1,850 meters), according to UNESCO. The usually warm and dry climate is interrupted by two rainy seasons — March to May, and a shorter season in October and November.
Each year the great wildebeest migration begins in December in the Ngorongoro area of the southern Serengeti of Tanzania, which offers rich grasslands for feeding. This is a huge attraction for tourists, and while many think it is an intense and short-lived phenomenon, it is actually a fairly slow trek. It occurs during this time because there plenty of rain-ripened grass available for the 750,000 zebra that precede 1.2 million wildebeest and then the hundreds of thousands of other plains game bringing up the
Wildebeests bear their young in February and March, which sparks predators. Then, in May as the plains of the south and east dry out the mass moves on to the north and west crossing the Grumeti River, where there is more grass and more a more reliable water supply.
Some 250,000 wildebeest die during the journey from Tanzania to Maasai Mara Reserve in lower Kenya, a total of 500 miles (800 km), according to the World Wildlife Fund for Nature. Death is usually from thirst, hunger, exhaustion, or predation.
And some wildebeest drown. An average of 6,250 wildebeest die every year crossing the Mara River in eastern Africa during this annual migration. And scientists have found their deaths weren’t for naught. Reporting online June 19, 2017 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers looked at 13 mass drownings that occurred between 2001 and 2015, finding that the thousands of corpses are the equivalent of more than 1,000 tons of biomass that can feed the Serengeti. Animals that benefit include scavengers like vultures and crocodiles, as well as maggots and even fish and algae that benefit from the nutrients released from the wildebeests’ bones