New study from Rob Pringle gives us answers to the mysterious “fairy circles”
No one is certain what causes the enigmatic “fairy circles” of the Namib Desert.
The rings of burnt orange dirt, each impeccably round and enclosed in a fringe of tall, tufted grass, emerge suddenly from the spare landscape. Over the course of decades they expand — some become big enough to fit a school bus — then fade, as if they are creatures that live and die.
Not even scientists can agree on an explanation.
“This is a classic thing in ecology where debates will emerge and go on for decades,” said Rob Pringle, an ecologist at Princeton University. “And the resolution after all that time is usually, 'Well, it's a little bit of both.' ”
— Rob Pringle, Quoted in The Washington Post
That's the conclusion of a new paper Pringle and his colleagues published Wednesday in the journal Nature. Using computer models, the scientists demonstrated that the circles can emerge from complex interactions within and between termite colonies and the grass that grows around them. Their research explained not only the vast arrangement of the circles themselves — which mimics the hexagonal pattern of spots on a Chinese checkers board — but revealed the less noticeable centimeter-scale pattern of the grassy spaces between the circles.
The result doesn't definitively resolve the question of the fairy circles' origins — only experiments in the field can do that. But it does illustrate how order can emerge from chaos, and it offers hints at the strange geometry of the universe. It is a lesson in ecology, math and physics, written in sand by bugs and blades of grass.
