Beetles seem to be most immune from the heat, dashing about as the sun rises to its zenith when all other creatures go to ground. They are me detritivores, in all senses the bottom feeders of the sand sea ecosystem. They feed on the shredded grass stalks, grass seeds and dried-out animal bits - the detritus - that blows around on the gravel corridors between the dunes.
This is a system mat depends not on rain but on the frequent fogs that come off the frigid southern Atlantic to soothe the dunes and desert plants with cool droplets of condensed water. One beetle, Onymacris unguilaris, emerges from the dune face and climbs to the summit. There it raises its carapace like a satellite dish for the cool moisture to collect. Droplets run down its body and legs and are directed to its mouth by runnels on its carapace.
So well adapted is Onymacris and its kind that we might deduce that humans got it all wrong: this was a land created not for our kind but for creatures such 'as the beetles that are perfectly adapted to life in the desert sands around Sossusvlei. It certainly gets you thinking about creation and the nature of the creator.
When the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Carey, asked the celebrated British biologist JBS Haldane what the study of nature had taught him about the nature of God, Haldane famously answered that "He" must have had an inordinate fondness for beetles.
To more fully quote Haldane, he noted that God was most likely to have created life in his own image, and the approximately 400,000 efforts at creating the perfect beetle stand way above His single attempt at creating humans.
But it is not only small creatures of the so-called lower orders that inhabit the Namib Sand Sea. On a visit there you will almost certainly see stately oryx, or gemsbok, jackals, bat-eared foxes, and individual or small groups of springboks, dainty gazelle-like antelope that can survive without ever drinking water.
They obtain almost all their nutrition as well as their liquid requirements from the grasses they eat and, when there is no grass available, then from the lichens that almost imperceptively cover the stony inter-dune corridors like a ghostly gossamer of lacy threads: what the Afrikaans people of the region might call spookasem (ghost breath).
Space Enough for Freedom
The sky at Little Kulala is one of its great attractions, with minimal light pollution to dim the celestial show. The centre of the plane through the centre of our Milky Way galaxy lies close to the Southern Cross, which explains why southern skies appear so much more spectacular than those of the north.
The Namib is a place of silence. Even the wind has a purity about it, uncluttered by rustling leaves, banging dustbin lids, car alarms or barking dogs. It is a pure sound, what the paranormal science writer Lyall Watson calls "heaven's breath". When the wind is still, there is fragmentary sound - maybe discrete birdsong of the occasional lark or finch. Each note is pure, clear and distinct, like drops of liquid metal being dropped into a cauldron.
The sun sinks as abruptly as it rises, quick as a coin into a pay slot, and then the lounge lizards come out. The desert comes most truly alive at night. But the barking you will hear is not that of logs, it is that of finger-sized lizards that emerge. from burrows and fill the velvety dusk with territorial challenges.
This is a dicey evolutionary strategy for a male barking gecko - a fine line between and becoming the meal of a lethal, thick-tailed parabuthus scorpion. This is the dance of life and death; he who barks the loudest gets to mate quickest and lives to dance another day.
By David Bristow
Little Kulala Lodge near Sossusvlei in the Namib Naukluft Park, Namibia, offers magnificent dune scenery to the west and rugged Namib mounta...
Namib Desert Attractions - A visit to the arid plains and red sand dunes of the Namib Desert leads to many safari experiences such as climbi...