A tale of elephants, ants, trees and fire shows how complex nature is

ECOLOGY IS A complicated thing. Given the facts that elephant damage often kills trees and bush fires often kill trees it would be reasonable to deduce that a combination of the two would make things worse. Counter-intuitively, though, as research just published in , by Benjamin Wigley of Nelson Mandela University in South Africa shows, if a tree has already been damaged, fire can actually help to make things better.One common way in which elephants harm trees is by stripping them of their bark. Dr Wigley, who did indeed start from the obvious assumption, set off to find out how much worse bush fires would make the effects of this bark-stripping. To this end he set up a study in the Kruger National Park, a reserve on South Africa’s border with Mozambique.