If you’ve watched a giraffe browsing in the tree canopy, a white rhino meandering across open grassland or a warthog shuffling around on its knees in South Africa’s Kalahari desert, you know what they eat: leaves, grass, shoots and roots. With every mouthful, they swallow something less obvious – soil.
Some ingest more soil than others, but all are exposed to toxic elements, such as arsenic, lead or chromium.
I study how environmental pollutants affect wildlife health. I led a team that investigated how and why soil ingestion varied between 16 African herbivore species at Tswalu Kalahari Reserve, in South Africa’s southern Kalahari desert.
