Steve Pike — The smallest tortoise in the world lives on South Africa’s west coast, and a button-shaped succulent endemic to a tiny area of the Northern Cape can be found nowhere else in the world. But the area’s unique fauna and flora are under threat from poaching, mining, farming, and climate change.
AN ARID EDEN OP-ED
South Africa’s west coast, and the hinterland it borders, looks harsh and desolate, but a mere 30 years ago, if you were a naturalist seeking fauna and flora species endemic to specific regions, you would have unearthed a bubbling abundance in a vast, arid ecosystem.
Scanning the veld, you would have found a wonderland of curious dwarf succulents from the genus Conophytum, some covered in a fine film of fur like a baby’s bottom (“baba boude” in Afrikaans). You would have found living pebbles pushed into crevices – others in the form of “waterblasies” (water blisters), dumplings, cubes, cones or tiny bowls.
Back then, if you stopped and sat for a while in the Richtersveld and parts of the Karoo – an ancient Khoi/San word that means “dry” or “thirsty place”, you might have seen the smallest tortoise in the world amble past, ploughing a path through the plants in…
