Animals of Africa

Africa is the only continent where the large-mammal fauna of the Pleistocene largely survived. Elsewhere the giants disappeared as people spread; here elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, giraffes and the full predator guild that hunts them are still in place. That is why an African savanna reads as the default image of wildlife — it is close to what most of the world looked like before the last ice age ended.

The continent splits into a handful of enormous biomes, and the map makes the divisions obvious. The Sahara cuts a barrier across the north that few mammals cross, and the species living in it — addax, dorcas gazelle, fennec fox — are specialists that cannot survive outside it. South of the desert, the Sahel gives way to a belt of savanna and open woodland running from Senegal to Ethiopia, the range that antelope, zebra, lion and cheetah share. The Congo Basin holds the second largest rainforest on Earth, and with it the forest elephants, okapi, bonobos and gorillas that never leave the canopy's shade. The Rift Valley lakes and highlands of East Africa function as an island chain of altitude, which is why so many of the species restricted to a single mountain in Ethiopia, Kenya or Tanzania exist nowhere else.

Conservation on the continent is a story of two trends running in opposite directions. Southern Africa has stabilised or grown several flagship populations through fenced reserves and community conservancies, while West and Central Africa have lost ground steadily to habitat conversion and the bushmeat trade. Species with wide historic ranges — lion, cheetah, African wild dog — now show maps of scattered fragments where they once showed a continuous block.