You are looking at a “succulent” which is highly prized by gardeners, worldwide.
Very probably, this wild, uncultivated one is an example of Cotyledon orbiculata, commonly known as “pig’s ear”.
Comments closedTag: Namibia
Some Namib-dwellers – plants and animals – look extremely tough, “hard-shelled”, “brutal”.
Others, however, have a surprisingly “delicate” appearance.
I have no idea of even the common name of the pictured example.
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This post and the next two in this series are devoted to striking examples of plants that have evolved/adapted to survive in the least-rainy part of the Namib Desert.
The featured image’s stark centre of attention is (I am almost sure) a particularly hardy member of the geranium family.
It is probably one of the “Sarcocaulons” – members of what was formerly the generally-recognised genus Sarcocaulon.
Since 1996 these plants are usually numbered as members of the genus Monsonia.
One species – which may or may not be the one pictured above – contains a highly flammable resin which persists even when the plant is “dead”…or “dead”-ish.
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A hunch about the “castles”…
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The Hoarusib is one of several ephemeral Namibian desert rivers that have generated so-called “sand castles”, or “clay castles”.
These extraordinary landforms’ origins and age are shrouded in mystery, speculation, and competing theories.
I am quite unable to offer a definitive explanation, other than to quote some good sense from Roger Swart:
…there is abundant evidence that the silts were deposited by high-energy flows, separated by times of calm……The most likely explanation for the deposits is therefore flash floods during a wet period, which would have brought down a heavy sediment load that was dumped when the energy of the river waned.
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This post’s photos are not looking at the nearby “castles”, but the pictured bones, the cracked “skin” of the ground on which some of them sit, and the “castles” are all existentially indebted to the same kind of event.
It is an event that very rarely and only very briefly occurs in this nigh-rainless place: the Hoarusib River in silt-laden flood, so close to the Atlantic’s “Skeleton Coast”.
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This post’s photo (copyright Doug Spencer) was taken at 10.14 am on 14 November 2022, nearly twenty minutes after the previous post’s.
We were making our way back down to the bed of the Hoarusib River, which we would then drive along a little further inland, before turning left, into a canyon that the Hoarusib occasionally “invades”/floods.
That canyon has “sandcastles” that are vastly bigger – and enormously older/more durable – than any sandcastle on any seashore…as you will see in #11 & #12 of this series.
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From 9.44 am through 10 am on 14 November 2022, the pictured rock and yours truly were sharing the very same hilltop.
Whilst the rock itself was an inanimate object, living beings very successfully occupied a deal of its exposed surfaces.
These beings are neither plants nor animals; as you can see, more than one species are obviously-present on this particular rock.
A lichen is a composite organism that emerges from algae or cyanobacteria living among the filaments (hyphae) of the fungi in a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship.
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This post’s featured photo was taken from essentially the same vantage point as yesterday’s; both “clock time” and my feet had advanced barely at all.
However, turning my/my camera’s gaze in a different direction (looking northwest rather than southwest, I think) offered a very different view.
You are looking at many different minerals; in some cases, they comprise rocky hills/mountains.
Others are present as “grains of sand”…grains which have different densities, and which – to a considerable and visible extent – have been “sorted” by the wind.
The pink streaks are probably garnets.
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Although the vantage point remains the same, this post’s images were shot with a telephoto lens; effectively, their view of the Hoarusib River is nearly seven times “closer” than that offered by the image in this series’ previous post.
At this point, the river and its surrounding landscape are quite unlike where the Hoarusib – rarely, and briefly – delivers a readily-visible flow of fresh water to the “Skeleton Coast” edge of the Atlantic Ocean.
Yet, where I stood – and the stretch of the Hoarusib visible in these photos – are only circa 30 minutes’ drive from the river’s oft-dryish mouth.
In a straight line, the ocean is almost certainly rather less than 20 kilometres distant.
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