From Stories to Science: The Fairy Circles Namibia

When it comes to the natural world, have stories ever been enough for humans? 

Sure, they might satisfy us for a few generations but in the end our desire for truth always prevails. After all, aren’t stories just fancy lies we tell to comfort ourselves? It’s fun in movies and books and folklore but when it comes to science, it just isn’t satisfying enough. 

At the same time, stories are sometimes all we have to explain fantastic natural phenomena. It’s a lie that allows us to begin to understand. 

Case and point: the fairy circles of the Namibian desert. 

The Namibian desert might not be what comes to mind when you think of the word “desert” (its cousin the Sahara would definitely win a popularity contest). But believe it or not, it is probably the oldest desert in the world, having existed for about 55-80 million years. Despite this, the desert is actually not entirely devoid of water or life. Surprisingly, between the months of January and March, there is heavy rainfall all across the Namibian desert. In these conditions, a leafy plant called grass grows. Not a lot, but some. And this is where we’ll find the mystery that this article focused on. 

Throughout the thousands and thousand of square kilometers of sparse grass, a spectacular pattern emerges; circles.

From up above, it’s a strange and almost extra-terrestrial view. The Namibians themselves have tried to explain these formations with stories. They call these circles “Fairy Circles”, the product of supernatural causes. To a more western-inclined mind, these circles might even resemble the famed crop circles of American cornfields.

But the answer to the mystery of fairy circles doesn’t lie with aliens up in the sky; it lies in the desert below, and the things that live there. 

A specific species of termite is among the many creatures that call the Namibian desert its home, and it goes by the name of Psammotermes allocerus. And it turns out that these little guys are the masterminds, the engineers behind the ‘fairy circles’ of Namibia. Not little fairy people with wings like Namibian cultural lore suggested, but six-legged, sharp-toothed termites. 

Here’s how they do it:

1. As rain falls in the Namibian Desert, grass springs to life.

2. Among this sudden increased moisture and the quick growth of grass roots through the desert sand, our protagonists (the termites) sense an opportunity

3. They build their nests beneath the sand, eating any grass roots they come across while undertaking this project.

4. This effectively leaves the top of the termite nest bare and without any grass. (This becomes the inside of the fairy circle.)

5. The nest then turns into a kind of ‘reservoir’ of water, where the termites are able to consume the water trapped in the soil. 

6. For the grass just surrounding the nest, the reservoir gives them enough water to allow them to grow thicker, forming a dense circle around the nest’s perimeter.

And that, in a nutshell, is the blueprint for the famed fairy circles of Namibia. They aren’t the result of supernatural beings or causes, but rather an equally fantastic feat of ecosystem engineering by termites.  

And that brings us back to the start of this article: the stories we make up to explain the things that seem unexplainable. While those stories are false (like in the case of the Namibian fairy circles), they reveal something very true about us. We can’t accept the unexplainable. Nothing can ever be just as it is; there must always be a reason. 

It’s that curiosity, that desire to understand, that has pushed us beyond using stories to explain what we don’t know and into actually uncovering the truths of our world. And in that way, the true beginning of science is within those stories. 

References:

Daniel Stone, National Geographic, September 2013.