Where would you guess that the world's highest concentration of servals lives? Not in the mountains, nor a wildlife refuge, nor a national park. It's inside the fences at the world's largest coal liquefaction plant in northwest South Africa. Among the industrial smokestacks and barbed wire, servals have found a home. The Sasol plant’s ecologist Daan Loock heard rumors of the cats twenty years ago, and began setting camera traps in 2010. Evidence of the reclusive cats was right there, and their numbers are growing.
The population is “incredibly important,” explains Dr. Sam Williams (one of Loock’s co-authors on a paper about the conservation value of industrialized sites and postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Venda) because it “demonstrates how carnivores can coexist with human activities at the extremes of what was thought possible.”
This might be the understatement of the year.
The cats, which reside in grasslands and wetlands throughout sub-Saharan Africa, are about the same height and weight as a female whippet but they somehow manage to be slighter and more delicate — as their “near threatened” (in South Africa) status shows. Historically, the Highveld — the California-sized, high-altitude plateau where Secunda is located — was littered with wetlands. But mass agriculture (mainly maize and beef) has transformed the landscape and drastically reduced serval numbers.
Read how these cats adapted to the industrial facility at Ozy.
(Image credit: Daan Loock and Sam Williams)