Which one of the following natural regions is known as 'Land of Big Games' ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — D, Tropical Savanna Region. 'Big game' is the old hunter's term for large wild animals, and the regional geography textbooks give the title 'the land of big game' to the tropical savanna, also called the Sudan type or tropical continental region, which lies between the equatorial rainforests and the hot deserts at roughly five to twenty degrees north and south. The reason is ecological, not literary. The savanna's alternation of a wet high-sun season and a long dry season produces vast expanses of tall coarse grass — elephant grass can exceed three metres — dotted with scattered, drought-resistant, deciduous trees such as acacia and baobab. Open grassland of that extent is the richest possible fodder base for large grazing and browsing animals, and there is enough tree cover for browsers without the closed canopy that would shut out the grass. The result, above all in the African savanna belt from the Sudan region eastwards into Kenya and Tanzania, is the greatest concentration and variety of large mammals on Earth: elephant, giraffe, zebra, wildebeest, buffalo, antelope, rhinoceros and hippopotamus, together with the predators that live off them — lion, leopard, cheetah and hyena. Colonial-era big-game hunting gave the region its name; today the same wildlife supports the great game reserves and national parks, and the safari tourism built on them.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The steppes, prairies, pampas, veld and downs are treeless interiors of the mid-latitudes carrying short, nutritious, sod-forming grasses under cold winters. They are famous as the granaries of the world and as extensive ranching country for cattle, sheep and horses — domesticated stock, not big game. Their great wild herds, such as the North American bison, were reduced to remnants by the end of the nineteenth century — the great slaughter came in the 1870s and 1880s.  (b) The monsoon lands of South and South-East Asia are defined by a seasonal reversal of winds and heavy summer rain, supporting tropical deciduous forest of teak and sal and, above all, dense agricultural populations growing rice. They do hold notable wildlife such as the tiger, but the region is classified in geography by its rainfall regime and its intensive subsistence farming, never as big-game country.  (c) The Sahara, Arabian, Thar, Kalahari and Atacama are the opposite case. Extreme aridity yields only sparse xerophytic scrub, which cannot feed large herds; desert animals are adapted to scarcity and are few in number, the camel being the characteristic large animal. Scarcity of forage is precisely what rules the desert out.

Concept: The world's natural regions are climate-vegetation-life units, and the tropical savanna is the transition belt between the equatorial rainforest and the hot desert. Its defining feature is a sharply seasonal rainfall regime: the sun's overhead position brings the equatorial rain belt across in the high-sun season, giving a wet summer of the order of eighty to one hundred and sixty centimetres, while in the low-sun season the trade winds bring drought, grasses wither and fires sweep the plains. That regime forbids continuous forest but favours grass, producing the parkland look of tall grass with scattered flat-topped trees. Ecologically, an open grass sward with seasonal flushes of growth supports enormous herbivore biomass and the large carnivores that depend on it, which is why the savanna is the world's big-game region. The largest expanse is African, but the llanos of the Orinoco basin, the campos of the Brazilian highlands and the grasslands of northern Australia belong to the same type.

State PCS 2019 Q125 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2019 Q125 — Geography PYQ with Answer