Heuweltjies are large above or near the surface of the landscape, a type of soil surface feature that occurs widely in the Western Cape of South Africa. Their formation has been the subject of a wide range of speculation and of debate.
Etymology
The
Afrikaans word
heuweltjie comes from the
Dutch language word
heuveltje 'hillock, small hill'.
Description
Heuweltjies are large mounds above or near the surface of the landscape. Like other phenomena, such as
Mima mounds and fairy circles, from which they have been poorly distinguished, particularly in early literature, they have been the subject of a wide range of speculation and of debate that has not yet been settled conclusively.
Causes
It is quite certain that not all types of heuweltjies have the same cause and nature. For one thing, the various organisms and circumstances that have been proposed to cause them do not occur throughout their range. For another, they differ in nature; some for example have been seen as improving soil fertility, an opinion documented at least as long ago as the early 20th century.
Possible theories and discussions on the topic include the following:
Fossil termite mounds
One theory is that heuweltjies are fossil
. Within this hypothesis, there are two conflicting opinions on the origins of heuweltjies, one maintaining that heuweltjies were built by the harvester termite
Microhodotermes viator, the other that heuweltjies were built by a now possibly extinct termite species.
[Midgley, J. J.; Harris, C.; Hesse, H.; Swift, A. Heuweltjie age and vegetation change based on 13C and 14C analyses. South African Journal of Science;Mar/Apr2002, Vol. 98 Issue 3/4, p202. (A study estimating heuweltjie age from calcrete from near the Clanwilliam Dam in South Africa.)] The earliest
radiocarbon dates on heuweltjies suggest an age of about 30,000 or even 40,000 B.P.
Mole-rats and/or termites
Another theory is that heuweltjies are created by burrowing (fossorial) animals. Variants of this hypothesis are that the animals are
in the families
Bathyergidae and
Rhizomyinae; termites; or a combination of mole-rats and termites. In a review paper, Walter Whitford and Fenton Kay state that while the mounds appear to have been created by termites, mammals (aardvarks) partially maintain the mounds by feeding on and living in them. They show a (log-log) correlation between the surface area of mounds including
, badger digs, bison wallows, mole-rat, prairie-dog and banner-tail kangaroo rat mounds, with the longevity of the disturbance ('', i.e. disturbance of soil by living agents including animals, roots, etc.): a heuweltjie of 100–1000 square metres is 1000–10,000 years old.
Differential erosion
Yet another theory is that heuweltjies are caused by differential
erosion in places where the availability of water limits the growth of vegetation, creating natural patterns such as
tiger bush. In favour of this theory, Michael Cramer and his colleagues note that heuweltjies contain at least ten times more soil than any
in South Africa, and that they can occur on bedrock, which termites could not be tunnelling through to move soil upwards. Further, the heuweltjies had the same spatial distribution as bush-clumps, patches of woody vegetation forming patterns. They suggest that heuweltjies formed from bush-clumps as these protected the soil from eroding away, producing calcrete hardpans.
Ecosystem theory
In 2017 Corina Tarnita and colleagues published a paper in
Nature which explained these and other related self-organised vegetation patterns by means of a general theory which integrates scale-dependent feedbacks and the activities of subterranean ecosystem engineers such as termites, ants, and rodents.
Effects
Heuweltjies modify their local environment, creating a patchwork of habitats in the
Nama Karoo ecosystem. Soils in heuweltjies are finer-grained, contain more water, and are more
alkaline than surrounding soils, and they support differing animal and plant communities. Both
aardvark and
steenbok use heuweltjies as dung
; they are often colonised by Brant's whistling rats (
Parotomys brantsii); and sheep graze and leave dung on them.
[ Page has extensive bibliography.]
See also
