100 Fun Facts About The Serengeti

The Serengeti National Park lies in the north of which country?

The wider Serengeti region also extends across the border into south-western Kenya.

The name Serengeti is popularly said to come from a Maasai word meaning what?

Oddly, the supposed source word does not actually appear in dictionaries of the Maa language.

Roughly how many zebra travel with the great migration each year, ahead of the main herds?

Up to half a million Thomson's gazelle and smaller herds of eland travel too.

The migrating herds cross into which Kenyan reserve for the dry season?

'Mara' means 'spotted' in Maa, after the short bushy trees dotting the landscape.

Roughly how long is the complete great migration route?

It is the world's second-longest overland migration, after that of the caribou.

Roughly how many wildebeest die each year on the migration from thirst, hunger, exhaustion or predators?

Around 30,000 zebras die too, and for every wildebeest a crocodile takes at the river, fifty drown.

About how many calves do the wildebeest give birth to on the short-grass plains in a two-to-three-week window in February?

Calves born early rarely survive because they stand out among the previous year's youngsters.

Which two rivers do the herds have to cross, with around 3,000 crocodiles lying in wait?

The crossings begin in July and are one of the most popular sights on safari.

Which is the only permanently flowing river in the Serengeti ecosystem?

It rises on Kenya's Mau Escarpment and drains into Lake Victoria; deforestation of the Mau Forest has changed its flow.

In which year was the Serengeti National Park established?

Major Richard Hingston had proposed national park status in 1930, and strict protection came in 1948.

In 1959 an 8,300-square-kilometre tract in the park's east was split off for the resident pastoralists. What was it re-established as?

It was set up as a multiple land-use area where Maasai pastoralism could continue.

The Ngorongoro Crater is the world's largest inactive, intact and unfilled example of what?

It formed when a huge volcano erupted and collapsed two to three million years ago; the floor covers 260 square kilometres.

How deep is the Ngorongoro Crater?

The original volcano may have stood 4,500 to 5,800 metres tall before it collapsed.

The name Ngorongoro is said to imitate the sound of what?

The Maasai pastoralists named it; the first European to enter the crater was Oscar Baumann in 1892.

Which steep ravine in the eastern Serengeti plains is one of the world's most important sites for early human fossils?

Its name comes from the Maasai for 'the place of the wild sisal', which grows all through the ravine.

Which husband-and-wife team pioneered the excavations at the Serengeti's famous fossil ravine in the 1950s?

Their family continues the work today; the site is one of the country's National Historic Sites.

In July 1959 Mary Leakey found the skull of which hominin at Olduvai's FLK site?

Its sagittal crest and huge molars suggested a diet of tough plants; Homo habilis remains followed in the 1960s.

Which German zoo director and his son made the Oscar-winning 1959 documentary Serengeti Shall Not Die?

He was director of Frankfurt Zoo and a household name in West Germany through his TV series Ein Platz für Tiere.

How did Michael Grzimek die during the filming of Serengeti Shall Not Die in January 1959?

He was flying the zebra-striped Dornier the pair used for aerial animal counts; the bird was probably a Rüppell's griffon.

Which Academy Award did Serengeti Shall Not Die win in 1960?

The companion book, published in English in 1961, became a bestseller.

Roughly how many lions live in the Serengeti ecosystem, the largest population in Africa?

Since 2005 the park and the neighbouring Kenyan reserve have together formed a Lion Conservation Unit.

An outbreak of which disease killed roughly a third of the Serengeti's lions in 1994?

Mass rabies vaccination of domestic dogs has since protected both people and endangered wild dogs.

Which predator became extinct in the Serengeti National Park in the early 1990s before being returned in 2012?

Lions and spotted hyenas steal their kills and kill them directly, keeping numbers low across the region.

To roughly what number did 1980s poaching reduce the Serengeti's eastern black rhinos?

Fewer than 70 survived in the park as of the mid-2020s.

How many Masai giraffes were estimated to live in the park in 2010, down from 10,750 in 1977?

Numbers have stabilised in the centre of the park but keep falling around the edges.

What are the granite outcrops of the Serengeti plains, used as lookouts by predators, called?

They are ancient plutons uplifted 180 million years ago, and their trapped soil supports trees where the plain has only short grass.

The Serengeti's volcanic grasslands grow on ash from Kerimasi and which still-active volcano famous for its natrocarbonatite lava?

Rapid weathering of that unusual lava created layers of calcareous tuff and hard-pan soils.

What is the main settlement inside the Serengeti National Park, home to its primary airstrip and research institute?

Human habitation in the park is otherwise forbidden except for park staff, researchers and lodge workers.

Which of the park's early game wardens is credited with bringing its rampant poaching under control?

Even so, a 2001 study estimated that around 200,000 animals are still killed by poachers every year.

A plan mooted in 2005-12 and revived in 2024 proposed building what through the park?

Conservationists warned it could disrupt the wildebeest migration; southern routes bypassing the park were proposed instead.

How much of the original Serengeti ecosystem was estimated to survive as of the 2020s?

Over 80 percent of what remained had legal protection from Tanzania and Kenya.

Thousands of the Serengeti's pastoralists died in the 1880s from an epidemic of which disease?

Smallpox followed in 1892, and rinderpest wiped out their cattle.

The Maasai language, Maa, belongs to which language family?

It is related to Dinka, Kalenjin and Nuer, and the Maasai are the southernmost Nilotic speakers.

What is the Maa word for the traditionally red sheets Maasai people wrap around their bodies?

Kanga is the Swahili term for one-piece garments, and Maasai near the coast may wear a sarong-like kikoi.

The Maasai warriors' famous 'jumping dance', performed at the Eunoto coming-of-age ceremony, is called what?

The ceremony can involve ten or more days of singing, dancing and ritual.

Which 1982 rock song wrongly describes Kilimanjaro rising 'like Olympus above the Serengeti'?

Kilimanjaro is actually hundreds of miles to the east of the Serengeti.

Which band included an instrumental dual drum solo called 'Serengetti' on its 1978 album Shakedown Street?

The tribal jam interrupts the album's disco and soft-rock sound.

How fast can a blue wildebeest run?

They are extremely wary animals, most active in the morning and late afternoon.

By what other name is the blue wildebeest known?

English naturalist William Burchell first described it in 1823 as Connochaetes taurinus.

Roughly how many bird species have been recorded in the Serengeti?

They range from ostriches, secretarybirds and kori bustards to shoebills, flamingos and many vultures.

How can so many kinds of grazer share the Serengeti, according to its encyclopaedia entry?

Wildebeest prefer short grass, zebra taller grass; dik-diks take the lowest leaves, impala higher ones and giraffes higher still.

The Serengeti Research Institute was established at the park's main settlement in which year to monitor the migration?

By 1981 the park covered 12,950 square kilometres, less than half of the whole Serengeti.

How many tourists visited Ngorongoro's crater and conservation lands in 2023?

It is one of the country's most popular attractions and became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979.

Which German brothers farmed inside the Ngorongoro Crater until the First World War and tried to drive the wildebeest out?

They leased the land from German East Africa and threw shooting parties for their friends.

Which volcanoes' periodic ash flows helped preserve the fossils in the Serengeti's famous ravine?

The gorge cuts up to 90 metres into the bed of a Pleistocene lake.

The Serengeti migration is the world's second-longest overland migration after which animal's?

The complete Serengeti loop runs about 800 km; only the caribou trek of the Arctic covers more ground on land.

The Grumeti, Mara and Mbalageti rivers all flow west out of the Serengeti into what?

The Oldupai River is the odd one out, flowing east into the Olbalbal Swamps instead.

Deforestation in which Kenyan region has changed the hydrology of the Serengeti's Mara River?

The Mara is the ecosystem's only permanently flowing river, so changes upstream in Kenya's highlands matter for the whole migration.

For every migrating wildebeest a crocodile catches at a river crossing, roughly how many drown?

Around 3,000 crocodiles wait in the Grumeti and Mara, but the sheer crush of the crossings kills far more animals than the reptiles do.

In 1930 Major Richard Hingston proposed a Serengeti national park on a mission from which body?

It took a decade: the Serengeti became a national park in 1940 and got strict protection in 1948 when a board of trustees was formed.

After his death in 1987, where were Bernhard Grzimek's ashes laid to rest?

He had originally wanted his body left on the African plains for scavengers; instead his ashes were flown to Tanzania and buried beside Michael.

Alan Root's 1974 Survival film about the Serengeti migration was titled what?

Root, who also shot footage for Serengeti Shall Not Die, later won an Emmy and a Peabody for A Season in the Sun.

The Roots shot their 1974 Serengeti migration film from what unusual vantage?

In Safari by Balloon the following year, the Roots made the first hot-air balloon flight over Kilimanjaro.

Which primatologist was Serengeti filmmaker Hugo van Lawick married to from 1964 to 1974?

Van Lawick's Ndutu tented camp in the Serengeti became a training ground for a generation of wildlife filmmakers, and he was buried there in 2002.

Who narrated the 1994 IMAX documentary Africa: The Serengeti?

Hans Zimmer, fresh from scoring The Lion King, contributed to the soundtrack, reuniting him with the voice of Mufasa.

Which pop impresario behind American Idol created the 2019 BBC wildlife drama Serengeti?

Fuller, who also managed the Spice Girls, built the series around dramatised storylines for its animal characters.

Which Oscar winner voiced the 2019 drama Serengeti, which earned an Emmy nomination?

The Kenyan-Mexican actress won her Academy Award for 12 Years a Slave.

George Schaller's study The Serengeti Lion won which US literary prize in 1973?

Schaller moved to the Serengeti in 1966 for one of the first field studies of big-cat social behaviour; the book's subtitle is A Study of Predator-Prey Relations.

Who led the Serengeti Lion Project from 1978 to 2015, a record-length carnivore study?

Packer, a Texan, first came to Tanzania as a field assistant studying baboons at Gombe before switching to lions.

Snapshot Serengeti, a celebrated citizen-science project, had volunteers classify what?

The project grew out of the Serengeti Lion Project's grid of motion-triggered cameras and ran on the Zooniverse platform.

Which ecologist's Serengeti research anchors the 2018 documentary The Serengeti Rules?

Sinclair grew up in the Tanzanian bush and showed that a 1950s cattle-vaccination drive, not rainfall, let the wildebeest herds explode.

Curbing which cattle disease from the 1950s let Serengeti wildebeest numbers soar?

With the herds gone, the plains had burned in fierce annual wildfires; as the wildebeest returned, so did the trees.

Hans Kruuk's seven-year Serengeti study overturned which belief about spotted hyenas?

Later work found hunting supplies anywhere from half to 98% of a spotted hyena's diet depending on the area.

Why are spotted hyena clans smaller in the Serengeti than in the Ngorongoro Crater?

Clans can number up to 80 animals, and Serengeti hyenas spend the daylight hours resting on kopjes.

The Serengeti's Thomson's gazelle is named after an explorer of which nationality?

Grant's gazelle, its larger plains neighbour, is likewise named after a Scottish explorer, James Grant.

What is the Thomson's gazelle's stiff-legged bounding leap, a show of fitness, called?

Also called pronking, the display may tell a cheetah that this particular gazelle is too fit to be worth chasing.

Which Serengeti resident is the national animal of Tanzania?

Also called the Kilimanjaro giraffe, it is the largest giraffe species and therefore the tallest land animal on Earth.

Giraffe bulls in the Serengeti usually carry an extra what between their eyes?

Ossicones are skin-covered bony knobs that bulls swing like clubs when they fight.

The kori bustard that struts the Serengeti plains holds which distinction?

Serengeti males average about 12 kg, heavier than those measured in Namibia, and may be the heaviest animals still capable of flight.

The wildebeest rut typically begins on which night, hinting at a lunar influence?

The three-week rut follows the rains, when bulls are in peak condition, and conception rates can reach 95%.

Wildebeest cows typically give birth at what time of day?

Calving in the middle of the herd at midday gives a calf, which can stand within minutes, time to steady itself before night falls.

The Serengeti is one of only three surviving wildebeest migrations. Which is another?

The third is Zambia's Kafue; a century ago many such migrations existed, but fences and farms have severed the rest.

What prompts the herds to leave the Mara and head south again in early November?

They usually reach the short-grass plains of the southeast by December, in time for February's calving.

Rabies jabs for which animals protect Serengeti villagers and the endangered wild dog?

The wild dog vanished from the national park in the early 1990s, squeezed out by lions, hyenas and disease, before its 2012 return.

Serengeti National Park itself covers roughly how many square kilometres?

The wider ecosystem, including the adjoining reserves and Kenya's Mara, protects about 30,000 km².

Serengeti National Park is classed as a Category II protected area under whose system?

Category II means the area should be managed to protect whole ecosystems and ecological processes, not single species.

The Serengeti's long rains fall in which months?

A shorter second rainy season in October and November is what sends the herds back south.

Open woodlands of which tree genus dominate the remote northern Serengeti?

Commiphora includes the myrrh trees; the north runs from Seronera up to the Mara River and is the park's least visited region.

The crocodile-haunted Grumeti River empties into which arm of Lake Victoria?

The gulf is named for John Hanning Speke, the first European to reach the lake, in 1858.

Which town is the seat of Serengeti District, with a new international airport planned?

The district, home to the park's western gates, has no paved road linking it to the rest of the country.

Mara Region, home to most of the Serengeti, was the birthplace of which founding president?

Nyerere is buried in his home village of Butiama, where a museum tells the story of independence.

A February 2013 vote held in Arusha named the Ngorongoro Crater one of what?

The Serengeti migration, Kilimanjaro, the Sahara, the Nile, the Red Sea reef and the Okavango Delta completed the seven.

Which Austrian explorer became the first European to enter the Ngorongoro Crater, in 1892?

On the same Maasai Expedition he became the first European to reach Lakes Eyasi and Manyara and to enter Rwanda.

What is the flamingo-dotted seasonal soda lake on the Ngorongoro Crater floor called?

The Maasai call it Makat, meaning salt; it is fed mainly by the Munge Stream draining Olmoti Crater to the north.

The Ngorongoro Crater's only endemic mammal, named Mduma's, is what kind of animal?

Crocidura mdumai lives only in montane forest on the crater rim and is endangered by smallholder clearing.

Why is the lion population of the Ngorongoro Crater notably inbred?

Resident males expel the few migrants that do climb down, so hardly any new bloodlines enter the gene pool.

Which biting insects' 1962 plague cut the Ngorongoro Crater's lions from about 100 to 12?

Drought followed by dry-season rain bred swarms of Stomoxys flies whose bites left infected sores; numbers recovered to about 100 by 1975.

Since 2021 Ngorongoro's Maasai have been offered a move to Msomera, roughly how far away?

Human Rights Watch has called the 'voluntary' move coercive; Ngorongoro's Maasai population grew from about 8,700 in 1966 to over 93,000 by 2017.

Before collapsing into a caldera, the original Ngorongoro volcano may have stood how tall?

At that height it would have rivalled Kilimanjaro; the crater floor today sits at 1,800 m above sea level.

The name Olduvai comes from a Maasai word for which plant that grows through the gorge?

Tanzania now prefers the spelling Oldupai; the gorge was misnamed by the German doctor who found it in 1911.

Wilhelm Kattwinkel found Olduvai's fossil beds in 1911 while in East Africa studying what?

He noticed bones of an extinct three-toed horse, and never returned after funding a 1914 expedition cut short by war.

In 1931 at Olduvai, Louis Leakey won a bet with Hans Reck by quickly finding what?

Reck had searched for flint tools in 1913 and found none; Leakey's axe was volcanic rock, and 77 more turned up within four days.

Which of the Leakeys' sons found OH 7, the Homo habilis type specimen, at Olduvai in 1960?

The juvenile's jaw and hand bones earned it the nickname 'Johnny's Child'; Richard, the middle son, became the family's most famous fossil hunter.

What nickname did newspapers give Olduvai's 1959 skull OH 5 for its massive jaws?

The Leakeys themselves called the subadult 'Dear Boy'; its cranium now sits in the National Museum of Tanzania in Dar es Salaam.

Andrew Hill spotted the first Laetoli footprints in 1976 after falling while dodging what?

A colleague had thrown the dung at him; with his face inches from the rock, he saw antelope, rhino and hominin prints in the ash.

Which Tanzanian archaeologist unearthed the Ndutu cranium beside Lake Ndutu in 1973?

The skull's species is still disputed; the lake beside it is a seasonal soda lake where the wildebeest calve each year.

Which glassmaker developed the Serengeti sunglasses brand, known for photochromic lenses?

Corning nearly shut the line in 1984 before Zaki Mustafa grew its sales from $5 million to $62 million in seven years.

Chicago rapper Serengeti formed the trio Sisyphus with Son Lux and which indie songwriter?

Serengeti, born David Cohn, is the great-nephew of jazz trumpeter Sonny Cohn.

Ol Doinyo Lengai, whose ash feeds the Serengeti plains, has a Maasai name meaning what?

Maasai myth holds that the god Engai withdrew to the peak after a hunter struck him with an arrow; its lavas erupt black and weather white within days.

Which click-speaking hunter-gatherers live around Lake Eyasi below the Serengeti plateau?

Only about 1,200-1,300 Hadza remain, and roughly a third still live entirely by foraging for honey, tubers and game.