Do wildebeest have a deathwish?
It would seem so, given that every year during their late summer, 2000-mile migration from Tanzania to Kenya and back again, something like 1000 (and usually less) wildebeest drown while crossing Kenya’s Mara River.
But this year, just last week, on their way back to Tanzania around 10,000 wildebeest died when they got stuck in a particularly nasty stretch of river. That’s 1% of the total population!
As far as we know, wildebeest don’t really have a deathwish. According to reports, what happened was something like a massive freeway pileup when one car flips over and crashes, causing cars behind it to smash into each other.
The first wave of wildebeest to cross the river entered at a point that was too steep, and got stuck. Wildebeest (also known as gnu) evidently aren’t the brightest species on the planet, because the rest of the herd rushed onward, crashing into the animals already struggling in the water. This kept happening, day after day, until nearly 10,000 gnu had drowned in a grisly river pileup.
The only winners here are the scavengers–crocodiles, storks, and vultures–feasting on the sudden bounty of waterlogged wildebeest corpses.
The losers? The wildebeest, of course. And the river, now polluted by thousands of rotting bodies. And since many of the carcasses piled up under a bridge downstream from the site of the original pileup, anyone needing to cross that bridge.
Wildebeest are not an endangered species–there are around 1 million roaming the Serengeti. So the sudden demise of 10,000 doesn’t put the species on the brink. But according to a blogger chronicling the morbid scene, it’s not hard to imagine that the death of so many animals will have at least some effect.
Source: National Geographic News
Hmmm… interesting. I wonder what percentage of Americans die every year in traffic pile -ups on highways every year. Some extraterrestrial intelligence might look down on us and think of us as having a death wish!
Deborah
Is this just a freak traffic accident, or has this happened occoasionally throughout history?
Plus, I can’t help thinking that we can take a lesson from the wildebeests’ disaster, which make keep crocadiles hungry: make your own decisions!
Good question. We all know about lemmings that dive off cliffs en masse. So I wouldn’t be totally shocked if other animals occasionally did something similar. But it’s probably uncommon. After all, dying in large groups is hardly the best way for a species to perpetuate itself.
Maybe they took a “hakuna matata” attitude a bit too far.
Maybe. What’s really stunning here, at least for me, is that this happened over several days. It’s one thing for a bunch of wildebeest to get stuck together and for the animals plunging in directly after them to add to the pileup. But you’d think that wildebeest showing up a few days later would sense that something wasn’t quite right. But apparently not. The site of their fellow gnus in the water was enough to make them follow. I’m sure there are parallels to this in human behavior . . . we see people doing something stupid but follow along anyway without really thinking about the consequences. Who hasn’t behaved that way at times?
I thought the lemmings were just an urban legend - even crowds of people will push each other off a cliff if they’re too crowded up against one. Snopes.com goes so far as to say that the Disney filmmakers (that originally filmed the cliff-diving rodents) herded them like the Native Americans did to the Bison. What’s incredible and sad about this event is the sheer number that kept pushing into the river.
Debbie asked above about car deaths, but they hardly compare. Annually, all around the world, car accidents only kill about 1.2 million people every year, which is about a third of a percent of the population, and that’s over an entire year. Lung Cancer alone kills more than that (but not by much). In the US, the amount’s even lower - just over 40,000 a year, around one eightieth of a percent. All of those figures are for the entire year, not in one day like happened to the wildebeest.
Nothing in history has ever killed as big a percentage of humans as fast. The plague killed more of us, but took decades. World War II - which killed nearly 3% of us - took nearly nine years. The 1918 flu pandemic killed 2% over a period of months (quite a lot right after WWI killed another half-percent), and starvation kills a little under one percent of us every year.
To lose one percent of humans as fast would be like losing the entire populations of the U.S., Russia, Mexico and the entire U.K. all at once. Only nuclear war has ever threatened to do that. So those extraterrestrials may yet look down on us and think we have a death wish, but we’ve (thankfully) never yet done it as quickly, or with as much gusto as these wildebeest.
Gnus acting so bizzarely, whales and sea lions washing ashore to die, and biologists cannot explain these incidents.
I think this is Mother Nature’s response to the ways we handle her planet. She’s sending us a very important message:
DO NOT ABUSE PLANET EARTH
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Silas,
A very interesting article.
I believe that a large number of people killed on the roads is because of a ‘death wish’ by drivers of vehicles. I see this almost every day.
At least the remains of the wildebeests provides food for other animals, unlike humans where the remains are burnt or buried.
I wonder if the ‘relatives’ of the wildebeests mourn or are saddende by the loss
of their mates or friends?
Possibly some research could be carried out on this?-if it has not been already done.
Life is like that - what a thing!
East Africa is full of wonders and the migration of the wildebeest is only one of them.
George
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