15. Matobo Time

Please visit the The Arts in Focus to obtain information about our 2014 Matopos Calendar - 

an initiative supporting rhino conservation in Zimbabwe.

Matobo Time

We sat high above Matopos on the warm granite with the cool breeze in our faces when Emile asked me how long I am going to be. “A lifetime...,” I answered. 

I watched him for a little while as the wind played in his hair. “The lifetime of the bacteria decaying this dung beetle or the lifetime of the big guy down there?” he asks as he sits up and points with a piece of grass to a white rhino down below in the valley. In my mind’s eye I suddenly see this place in a different dimension. I see Matobo made up, constructed of time, the make-up of life itself. At the smaller lever I “see” mitochondria buzzing around in cells and cells dividing and things growing and happening relatively fast at a microscopic level, as I did as a young zoologist. At the other end of the scale, under my hand I rubbed the fine dust off the granite rock, also at a microscopic level but at a temporal scale even my relatively intelligent mind struggles to fathom.  I wonder how long that took. As I gazed over the landscape surrounding me, instinctively the scientist in me started to divide the world around me into discrete groups of individuals, events and processes based on the relevant timescale during which it happens or lives. 

When you consider the whole, the entire ecosystem, the time scale is millennia or eons, the longer yardsticks of time. However, when you break the system down into an array of increasingly smaller sub-systems, smaller and more precise units of time are required. You could measure the lifecycle of a rhino in years, while months are more appropriate to measure the gestation period of his equally obnoxious wife, but the passage rate of the grass through his digestive system is more appropriately measured in days. Fertilization of his calf took place within a few seconds while oxygen exchange in his enormous lungs is probably measured in smaller fractions of time. Many measures of time are appropriate to discuss the lifecycle of our rhino, but for others the entire process is over in a few seconds or even less. 

The shortest of events and lifetimes

A gust of wind may sweep across a field of grass and a million grasses are pollinated, just like that. End of story. A significant event that took a few fleeting seconds, but its impact will be prominent when a million grass seeds germinate in a few months time after the rains. Some critical events take place over a very short period of time. Raindrops fall, and the soil is instantly wet, just as the water was a fluid one moment and the next it's a gas.  Some smaller species complete an entire lifecycle in a few days. Some mysterious flowers only open to be pollinated at night, and then only for a few nights, and then its all over. Many of the smaller critters and plants typically only live for one season, then their duties as denizens of their world is complete. For them seconds and hours and days are far more relevant. Months are towards the outer extreme of time measurement for them.

Some lower organisms, live for only a very short periods of time, those single cell organisms and smaller invertebrates in ephemeral ponds transcend dry seasons as spores.  Similarly, some lower plants, some fungi live for very short periods of time, and are highly opportunistic in their approach to life. These shorter life cycles are controlled and affected by the duration of shorter environmental cycles, like day and night, the seasons with wet and dry cycles, cold and warm periods, and even the ratios between light and day. 

The annuals

Some plants and animals live according to very strict annual cycles. One year is the limit for them. Their life-cycles are punctuated by the seasons, normally starting with the rains and ending with the winter. Then there is a period of rest, the dormant stage. Annual plants transcend this period as seeds. The plant itself is no longer there, but many seeds remain behind to initiate new cycles of life. The animal equivalent to annuals are the many insect species who live for only short periods of time and survive the harsh period as eggs. Butterflies are the most typical of these. The eggs hatch in spring and the caterpillars eat their way to adulthood, go through their incredible metamorphosis and emerge as butterflies, painting the landscape in small sections from flower to flower.

For most of these smaller creatures, the annual cycle is all they will live through and experience. No memories of last year, or the year of great floods or the drought of 1982. They just have now, as there is no real past, apart from yesterday and last week and if they are really lucky last month. There also is no real future, no next year or ‘one day’. Perhaps they don't miss it because they don't have it. Perhaps now is enough.

Those who live a little longer

Others have a past and a future. I watch the young impala play, learning about their futures.Their lives are measured in years rather than months. Other processes within them are measured in shorter yardsticks. Their gestation period is 7 months. They are affected by the annual cycles, breed highly seasonally so all the lambs are born in a very short time. Like the life cycles of the short lived species of Matobo, their lives are hugely controlled by the seasons, breeding cycles, times of abundance and shortages,  but the adults cross over into the next season and the next. For them, there must be more of a sense of the past and the future. Hence, the learning as youngsters, butting heads and chasing each other in mock predator prey plays. 

The barrier from the one season to the next, in Matobo, is winter, the dry season. I often think, in terms of evolutionary jumps/progress, crossing that invisible barrier must have been a great challenge and achievement. There are many ways in which to cross that bridge between being one and being two years old! Some plants do it by going dormant in the harsh part of the year. Some trees loose their leaves and sit out the winter. They just hang in there, expending as little energy and resources as possible. Others, like many reptiles will eat as much as they can before the winter and then find a cosy place to hibernate, allowing their body temperatures to drop. They use as little energy as possible to stay alive and then emerge pretty lean when spring arrives. Others are simply big enough, mobile enough and store enough reserves to carry them through winter. These are often the warm blooded part of the family, those who can collect and burn energy to stay with us on the surface during winter. These guys can often live for many many years. Think rhino and elephant. The cold blooded strategy also works well for crocodiles and pythons and tortoises. They live long because they use their energy sparingly and add up the years that way. For them the lifespan yardstick is very long... decades.

Leaving individual lives behind...

There are other timescales that are also relevant. Those which goes beyond the scale of individual lives. When we think about how the whole of the system evolves and develops, it essentially operates at a time scale way beyond the relevant measures of the oldest of individuals. The growth of, and the interactions between individuals within populations, allows for individual species to evolve into functional groups of communities, whether they are antelope communities, grasslands, forests or wetlands. At this level, shorter processes and limited lifespans merge into one another and all fuse to produce larger infinite timescales. The shorter timescales are still important, but they have merged into one another and like the different pieces of a mosaic they loose their individual relevance when looked at from a distance. Similarly, at least in my mind the cyclic nature of the smaller time intervals merge into processes of extended duration, creating the larger infinite temporal landscape. 

This is the scale at which the larger environmental processes are important. Cycles of dry and wet periods follow on each other, the result being the specific dynamics of forests and grasslands competing for area, predators and prey oscillate in numbers as some species increase and others crash.  All of this contributes to the overall variability within the larger system. These are experiences individual short-lived individuals and annuals species will never know about.

We watch the sun rapidly falling from the sky, announcing the end of another day, and we are forced down the hill to get to our vehicle before darkness turns Matobo into a stage for the nocturnal critters to play their role.

Emile walks down in silence, guiding us, and I think about circadian rhythms. It is the pulse of life,  while lunar cycles pace out the months, adding up into years, and years becoming decades and decades accumulate into longer and longer time periods, making up time itself and we are in there somewhere.

Please visit the The Arts in Focus to obtain information about our 2014 Matopos Calendar - an initiative supporting rhino conservation in Zimbabwe. 

12. The scale of life.

Please visit the The Arts in Focus to obtain information about our 2014 Matopos Calendar - 

an initiative supporting rhino conservation in Zimbabwe.

As I sit in my son’s sailboat on Mtshelele dam in Matopos, a tiny insect reminiscent of a mayfly perches on the clear water amongst the lilies near me. It does not even create the tiniest of ripples on the surface of the water. I watch this little critter for an instant or two before it shoots off into its own vast world. Instinctively I lift my gaze to take in the entire scene around me. I look up at the massive granite rocks on the other side backed up by an almost endless rolling landscape of hills and mountains and once again I am struck by the scale of this place. Go up one more level from this tiny insect fulfilling her life on a tiny part of this relatively small reservoir of water and this little dam becomes as small as my mayfly. Above a fish-eagle calls and I look up at his world spanning an area that would probably make Matopos itself seem limited. At his level my mayfly is insignificant… or is it?

Scale is often a very difficult concept to integrate or grasp when challenged with a large variation of dimensions or distances, heights and depths. Although we see very well in three dimensions, that capacity often gets distorted in complex environments and visual confusion may set in. We easily loose our ability to judge the size of exceptionally large things, such as a vast expanse of dunes, or a massive mountain range… Sometimes I think most people just give up, and focus simply on the surface, because the deeper layers make the world too complex to comprehend. Matopos itself is not nearly as vast as the Kalahari or Namib deserts, or the Drakensberg. In terms of geographical phenomena Matopos is relatively small. But the vast array of dimensional variety one has to deal with in a short period of time or over a very short distance is astounding. This multidimensionality is probably one of the main reasons it has been declared a world heritage site! It’s simply amazing the way the place is put together.

Not only is the scale of the structural components enormous, the scale at which things happens here is immense! From minute, microscopic to massive mountain sized repetitions of the same general theme… There are only so many ways in which granite can be formed and only so many in which it can be eroded, and only so many ways in which it can be stacked or ordered. However, add to this the continuous scale from millimeters to centimeters all the way up to kilometers in pretty much all the combinations possible, then you have many things going on at the same time. And that is only when you contemplate the rocks! Add to this the multitude of insects, other invertebrates, small vertebrates, the amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals from smaller than my little mayfly friend on his patch of lilies all the way to white and black rhinos that you may see from time to time… All of these can be seen in context when you place them into their little boxes on the food chain and tied together by their roles in the complex ecology of the natural world. Add to this the plant life from the lower forms (such as my beloved lichen and mosses, sticking it out in the harshest of environments in this place but contributing massively by pioneering new habitats and painting this enigmatic place with brilliant colors millimeter by millimeter per year) to the grasses and the more advanced plants all the way to the large trees. Some acacias bind life-giving nitrogen while others increase the structural world by supporting eagles’ nests and even the tiny flycatchers and the ever audible babblers. Just like the lichen, but much more noisily, they paint my mind with beautiful colors… All of these are incredibly interconnected and in my mind if you change something here, the effects can be seen elsewhere, if not today or tomorrow then somewhere in the future in the complex interactions that make up this incredible beast. Thus, the structural scale also determines the scale of the dynamics and processes at play here.

Then, as I begin to think that I have a vague hold on the construct of this place - from the tiny organisms that make up a single lichen to the rock they established themselves on to the hill itself, the valley between them and the subsequent valleys - just then in the distance the thunder announces another dimension to this world. I lie in my tent and watch as the immense lightning bolts crash through the rocks and echo in the valleys. I sit up and watch as the world braces itself for the next thunderous attack. I think of my delicate mayfly and I think of my vibrant lichens holding on to those rocks and those rocks holding on to larger ones! We have to keep this place safe, all places like these… from the lichens and the mayflies to the rhinos, the rocks and the little dam all the way up to the lightning, as well as the processes that renders these incredible components a functional system.

Just then a bolt of light floods the plains in glorious light and for a moment I see my world as if in the light of day. For that fleeting moment, like the flash of my own camera, this world is etched into my mind - a still image of my life. The clouds, where the lightning originated, the earth accepting it, exchanging their electric loads and I think of my soil science professor and the nitrogen released by the bolt of energy. I think of the role of the fresh water finding its way into the soil with the vital nutrients it contains. I think of them finding their ways into the stream and into the dam in which we will sail again tomorrow.