Researchers have documented the longest-known terrestrial migration of wildlife in Africa – up to several thousand zebra covering a distance of 500km – according to WWF.

 

Using GPS collars on eight adult Plains zebra (Equus quagga), WWF and Namibia’s Ministry of Environment and Tourism (MET), in collaboration with Elephants Without Borders (EWB) and Botswana’s Department of Wildlife and National Parks, tracked two consecutive years of movement back and forth between the Chobe River in Namibia and Botswana’s Nxai Pan National Park, a straight-line distance of 250km (500km round-trip). The findings are detailed in a new study published in the journal, Oryx.

 

The discovery comes at a time when migrations of a diverse range of species around the world are increasingly imperiled, and zebra migrations in other parts of Africa have been disrupted by physical barriers such as fences.

 

The potential conservation implications of the study are considerable. The observed migration takes place entirely within the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA) – the world’s largest multi-country conservation area.

 

Spanning 109 million acres across Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Angola, KAZA exemplifies the kind of large landscape conservation approach that will be necessary to preserve the world’s remaining great terrestrial migrations.

 

Continued long-term research will be needed to confirm that this is an annual and fixed migration, and whether this is genetically coded or passed behaviorally from mothers to offspring.

 

Watch the video below about collaring a zebra to track its record migration.