Elephants are steadily reducing the number of mature marula trees in the park, while regeneration has all but collapsed due to browsing from other herbivores. I have spent my life studying trees in the Kruger National Park. What I am seeing now troubles me deeply.
While the elephant debate grows louder and more emotional, a quieter ecological collapse is unfolding. This is not an argument against elephants. It is a plea for biodiversity conservation before we lose something irreplaceable.
I have watched Kruger’s trees for most of my life. As a professional plant ecologist, I have walked its landscapes, studied its vegetation and photographed its changes over decades. Few things have disturbed me as much as the steady disappearance of mature marula trees.
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These are not marginal plants. Marulas are among the most iconic, ecologically valuable trees in the park. They anchor savanna systems, feed birds and mammals, shape animal movement and define the character of large areas of Kruger.
And yet, within my lifetime, their numbers have collapsed. To the casual observer this loss is easy to miss. Kruger still looks vast, green and alive.
Elephants are abundant. Tourists are reassured. And that balance is breaking.
A line from Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac has never felt more relevant to me: “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” Those wounds are often invisible to people who do not work closely with ecosystems. Trees do not die dramatically. They decline quietly.
And when they stop regenerating, the damage is already far advanced. Historical photographs of central Kruger show magnificent stands of mature marulas with expansive canopies. Today, in many areas, what remains are broken trunks, stripped bark and bare ground.
In places like the Crocodile Bridge area, the pattern is unmistakable: elephants have smashed or ring-barked the trees, and exceptionally high numbers of impala and other herbivores have removed every seedling and sapling that tries to establish. The result is a closed ecological trap. Old trees are dying, and young trees are not replacing them.
From a plant ecological perspective, this is not a debate. It is a diagnosis. As a student in the early 1960s, I was taught that conservation meant “the wise use of resources”.
Preservation – freezing nature in time – was understood to be neither realistic nor desirable. During those years I was actively involved with what is nowWessa. Two major conservation battles dominated our attention in Kruger.
One was the successful fight to prevent coking coal mining inside the park. The other was raising funds to build artificial water points.
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