Synchronised Wildebeest Calving

Assembled from 29 blocks · 3 evidence · 20 related

1. Story
2. The annual birth pulse on the short-grass plains, in which the large majority of pregnant females calve inside a window of roughly three weeks between late January and mid-March. Popular accounts put the total at 400,000 to 500,000 calves; the figure is a derivation from population size and pregnancy rate rather than a counted number, and it varies with which census estimate is used. Synchrony is reinforced behaviourally: females exposed to playback of male rutting calls were more than three times more synchronous in expected time to mating than isolated controls (Berry et al., Scientific Reports 2018). The functional explanation usually given is predator satiation — so many calves appear at once that resident predators cannot take a large fraction of them.
3. Knowledge
4. Southern Serengeti Short-Grass Plains
5. Synchronised Wildebeest Calving
6. Spotted Hyena (Crocuta crocuta)
7. Volcanic Ash Soils of the Southern Plains
8. Connections
9. Volcanic Ash Soils of the Southern Plains
10. Southern Serengeti Short-Grass Plains
11. Spotted Hyena (Crocuta crocuta)
12. The rut
13. The calving pulse on the short-grass plains
14. Synchronised Wildebeest Calving
15. Southern Serengeti Short-Grass Plains
16. The calving pulse on the short-grass plains
17. Blue Wildebeest (Connochaetes taurinus)
18. Blue Wildebeest (Connochaetes taurinus)
19. Ngorongoro Conservation Area — Western Plains
20. Synchronised Wildebeest Calving
21. Volcanic Ash Soils of the Southern Plains
22. The calving pulse on the short-grass plains
23. Synchronised Wildebeest Calving
24. Blue Wildebeest (Connochaetes taurinus)
25. The calving pulse on the short-grass plains
26. Evidence
27. Females exposed to playback of male rutting vocalisations were over three times more synchronous in expected time to mating than controls isolated from male stimuli, supplying a proximate mechanism for the calving pulse
28. Dry-season food supply, not predation, regulates the Serengeti wildebeest population — demonstrated across the post-rinderpest irruption, the 1977–1993 plateau and the 1993–94 drought die-off
29. The migratory wildebeest population was estimated at 1,366,109 animals in 2023 by manual triple-count aerial point survey