Serengeti road imperils vast herds
‘Keystone’ wildebeests will be cut off from dry season food, UBC prof says 
CBC News
Friday, September 17, 2010 | 3:00 PM ET A proposed road through Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park will lead to the collapse of an ecosystem celebrated for its vast herds of wildebeest and zebra, scientists warn. “The road will cause an environmental disaster by curtailing the migration of wildebeest,” said an opinion piece published this week in the journal Nature and signed by 27 researchers around the world. “Migratory species are likely to decline precipitously, causing the Serengeti ecosystem to collapse, and even flip from being a carbon sink into a major source of atmospheric carbon dioxide.” Construction of the two-lane road is slated for 2012 to provide truck traffic with a link from Tanzania’s coast to Lake Victoria and Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Congo. The proposed route cuts through 53 kilometres in the northern end of the park, a United Nations World Heritage Site because of its rich ecology. The route also crosses the path used by 1.5 million wildebeests and zebras as they travel north in search of food and water during the dry season. … But University of British Columbia zoologist Anthony Sinclair, one of the three lead authors of the article, said wildebeests don’t know how to deal with fences. “They run straight into them,” he told CBC’s Quirks & Quarks in an interview scheduled for broadcast Saturday. “They pile up against the fence and … they just push further forward until the whole lot of them get crushed.” … If the wildebeest can’t get to their dry-season food and water sources, at least half can be expected to disappear, causing large changes to the ecosystem, Sinclair added. Wildebeest eat grass, preventing it from burning and allowing trees to grow. They travel with other herbivores such as zebras and provide food for carnivores such as lions. “The whole system is basically linked to the wildebeest,” Sinclair said. “It’s what we call a keystone species. If we lose that as a keystone, then the whole Serengeti disappears as we know it.” …
