People living in different areas of the world are adapted to different temperatures. Think for example, people of Iceland will have a hard time living in Mali in the Sahara desert and vice versa. Even in South Africa, if you grew up at the cold west coast it was really uncomfortable to visit Natal for the holidays in December with the high temperatures and humidity.
Image: Fossil of Eurypterus remipes, a sea scorpion that lived 420 million years ago. © Millard H. Sharp 2017
How far back can you trace your family tree? A couple of generations to maybe a couple of hundred years? How about 460 million years? Because that is when the granddaddy of arachnids swam in the earth’s oceans, making the arachnid family tree truly ancient. And with more than 100 000 identified species living today, their family tree is not only ancient, but gigantic.
Figure 1: An inyanga in her ndumba, a sacred hut used for healing. On the shelves are her mutis (medicine). (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0)
Traditional medicine practice is deep-rooted in African cultures. Approximately 80% of southern Africa’s population relies on medicinal plants for its primary health care needs because modern medicine is either unobtainable or prohibitively expensive.
Certainly the most recognizable of all arachnids, spiders are ubiquitous little predators on every continent except Antarctica. Their lineage stretches back 380 million years, with some of the oldest known fossils such as Attercopus fimbriunguis dating from the Devonian period and still having segmented abdomens.
Adaptations in bill morphology, diet preferences and social structures: insights from some species in the Free State.
By Dawie de Swardt.
LBJ’s or “little brown jobs” in birding terms are cryptic or brownish birds and most of the time difficult to identify. Larks, together with other generally drab-coloured birds such as pipits, warblers and cisticolas; are small to medium-sized passerines with such cryptic plumages. They occur mostly in open, structurally simple habitats, ranging from desert and semi-deserts, the Karoo areas, to the moister transitional grasslands and savannah woodlands to the east. Many larks exhibit substrate colour-matching, the dorsal plumage in particular bearing a resemblance to the substrate of the environment it inhabits.