Gorongosa 2024-FULL-FINAL - Flipbook - Page 23
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GORONGOSA SPECIAL
There are 10,000
species of spiders alone.
What role do they play?
Naskrecki is fascinated by parasites, especially the many animals that
live off the backs (often literally) or heads of other species. At one point,
he was observing a caterpillar who had been parasitized by braconid wasps.
The caterpillar’s still-living body was paralyzed, having become the host
and food for wasp babies, covered with tiny cocoons, something he found
both “super cool and kind of cruel.” He watched a tiny wasp sitting on
top of the cocoons. Was it the moment of emergence from the host? As
he looked closer, he realized a different type of drama was happening:
The wasp was a hyperparasite, laying eggs in the creatures that had just
emerged from the caterpillar. It was a complex interaction, involving several trophic levels: caterpillar eats leaves, parasites eat caterpillar, hyperparasitoids eat the parasites. The relationships between each level are
completely unique—each type of caterpillar only eats one type of plant,
and so on—and they all rely on one another. Each of these specialized
parasites typically represents a new species, and it’s one reason scientists
now think parasitic wasps are probably the most species-rich group of
organisms on Earth.
Those interactions are part of what makes Gorongosa so fascinating.
The park’s habitats range from rainforests to woodland, savanna, and
marshes, which makes it one of a handful of parks around the world with so
many ecosystems in one protected place. It’s located at the southernmost
part of the great African Rift Valley, which rends the continent north to
south from the Red Sea to Lake Malawi. This geologic formation channels
life from East Africa to the park in a way that makes Gorongosa a converging zone for southern and eastern African species, an ideal nature-made lab
to understand how species interact with their environment.
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