Animals at the extremes: The desert environment

## 1 The desert climate: An introduction

### 2 Environments and populations

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# 2.1 Introduction

The unique climate and topography of each desert links to the unique and characteristic flora and fauna found there. From the brief description of deserts provided in Section 1, you can appreciate that a desert provides a variety of niches for animals and plants. The term ‘niche’ applied to animals describes its role in a particular environment, and includes a number of characteristics such as habitat range, how the animal feeds, its diet, its environmental requirements and also its predators. So a niche is effectively an animal's particular lifestyle within an ecosystem, and encompasses how it interacts with other organisms and the physical environment within that ecosystem. In desert ecosystems, insectivorous, herbivorous and seed-eating niches are occupied by small animals, including arthropods, lizards, small birds, rodents, squirrels and shrews. Medium and large-sized animals such as hares, gazelle, camels and ostrich occupy grazing and browsing niches. Predators include foxes, e.g. kit fox (Vulpes macrotis) and cats, e.g. cougar (Puma concolor) in the deserts of the southern USA and Mexico, and Rüppell's fox (Vulpes rueppelli) in the Arabian desert. Desert vertebrates make use of a variety of microenvironments and their associated microclimates, small-scale areas in which the climate is different from that of the habitat as a whole. For example, in a desert ecosystem, a cavity beneath a rock, a microenvironment, would have a lower T a than the surface and hence a different microclimate. A hyper-arid sandy desert, such as the Arabian desert, has a relatively low variety of microenvironments and associated microclimates available for vertebrates. Nevertheless, the sand at a few centimetres depth is significantly cooler than at the surface, and provides a relatively cool microenvironment for animals. In contrast, American deserts such as the Sonoran have a diverse range of microenvironments, and contain a richer diversity of vertebrate species.

Although our discussion here is restricted to vertebrates, you should be aware that many invertebrates, particularly insects, inhabit desert environments, and they provide an important food supply for many desert birds and mammals.

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