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    Inside This Extraordinary Living Lab

    At Gorongosa National Park, scientists are determined to understand how an ecosystem recovers from the decimation of war. The post Inside This Extraordinary Living Lab appeared first on Nautilus.
    by Katharine Gammon Jul 19, 2023 6 minutes

    The maximalism of the landscape dumbfounds me. The floodplain is electric green, the grasses a startling amber. Minutes after Erin Andrews drives our safari truck away from Chitengo Camp, the main lodge in Gorongosa National Park, there’s an immediate bounty of animals around us—bushbuck bounce beside the vehicle, wildebeest kick their gangly legs in the dust. “That’s so Lion King,” Andrews murmurs from behind the wheel. It almost feels as if we are driving through a living nature documentary. 

    This abundance is a far cry from the decimation the landscape endured during Mozambique’s 15-year civil war, from 1977 to 1992, when poaching and starvation wiped out more than 90 percent of large herbivores, such as antelope and elephant, and apex predators. And it may hold the answers to future recoveries.

    Bushbuck bounce beside our truck, wildebeest kick their gangly legs. “That’s so Lion King.”

    Andrews, a graduate student at Princeton University, studies mesocarnivores—mid-sized meat eaters—which seem to have an especially high density in Gorongosa. After the civil war ravaged the country, there were only about 20 lions estimated in the 1 million-acre

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