Even after an elephant dies, it goes on feeding the savanna for years

An elephant shapes its landscape for a lifetime — toppling trees, digging water holes, planting seeds in its dung. A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, following a Kruger National Park elephant named Alexander who died in 2009, shows the giving does not stop at death. For at least eight years, the ground where an elephant falls passes through a rich succession: microbes bloom, special plants take hold in the enriched soil, and herbivores arrive to graze the unusually nutritious greens. One great life, ecologists found, keeps subsidising an entire neighbourhood long after it ends.

SDG 15 · Life on land