How Do Plants & Animals Adapt to Subtropical Deserts?
The world's greatest arid expanses lie in the subtropical latitudes, where chronic areas of high pressure promote dry conditions. Despite the inherent difficulties of the environment, many plants and animals survive in these subtropical deserts.
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Environmental Hardships
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Subtropical deserts see staggering extremes of heat and cold. Precipitation is rarer here than anywhere else on the globe---and, when it falls, rain is unpredictably distributed and sometimes heavy.
Examples
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The largest desert in the world is the Sahara in North Africa, which forms a massive arid complex with the nearby Arabian Desert of southwestern Asia. Australia also has huge regions of subtropical desert in its interior and western reaches.
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Desert Vegetation
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Vegetative cover in subtropical deserts is usually sparse. In general, plants are either drought-resistant or drought-evasive.
Example: Atacama Plants
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The world's longest and driest desert is South America's Atacama, which lies between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes Mountains. A plant community survives in a thin belt of the desert by using moisture from coastal fog produced by the Humboldt Current.
Animals
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Many creatures in the subtropical deserts survive by being nocturnal---resting in cool fastnesses during the day, only coming out at night. A good proportion, like the desert-adapted rodents called jerboas, obtain the majority of their water from food.
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References
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- Photo Credit Image by Flickr.com, courtesy of Hamed Saber
