I Fairy Circles, one of the best-hidden mysteries of the Namibian desert, have no more secrets.
I famous grass circles with a diameter of up to 20 meters and which appear out of nowhere on the desert terrain of the African country, as well as having thrilled generations of travellers, they have always attracted the attention of scientists interested in explaining the enigma of these rings on the ground with the name fairy-tale and suggestive, which also appear in Australia.
Over the centuries the origin of the Fairy Circles has been explained with legends and fantastic or religious motifs: for example, according to the local Himba population these would be imprints of divinities and spirits. According to an ancient belief, however, these circular rings are nothing more than the traces of a person's puffs dragon that lives underground.
The German biologist Norbert Juergens of the Klein Flottbek Biocenter of the University of Hamburg has a completely different opinion, tracing the origin of the Fairy Circles to a much more prosaic and less fascinating cause than the traditional and imaginative explanations of the past.
The biologist's research, published in the journal Science, analyzed a 2.000 kilometer long strip of desert between Angola and the northern part of South Africa and came to the conclusion that the cause of the Fairy Circles is none other than the work of sand termites, aka Psammotermes allocerus, who like the legendary dragon live underground.
Apparently, to survive, these insects feed on the roots of plants that emerge from the ground after the rainy season. As the roots are missing, the soil becomes less compact and more porous and right here we notice the absence of vegetation in the central part of a circle, at the edges of which the grass continues to grow. Where there is no grass, rainwater is stored in the deeper layers of the subsoil, remaining available to insects that feed on it during the dry season.
