Wow, like I heard all these sweet little fairies floated over to West Australia on a shimmering breeze from Africa and they've decorated the desert with their magic circles, yeah?
Well, that's one more theory among many. There are a number of naturally occurring phenomena called fairy circles: the perfect rings of mushrooms in the woods where pixies and elves get it on in the moonlight; the exotically tattooed circle of swirls in the grasses of Iceland.
The fairy circles making news are those found in Namibia – perfect circles of bare earth bordered by a fringe of grass, like eyelashes. The plains are dotted with millions, arranged in a honeycomb formation, giving the suggestion they've been created as a giant abstract piece of art that can be seen only from the air. They were long believed to be a strictly African happening. And now they've turned up in the Pilbara, near the mining town of Newman in West Australia. Spooky.
So maybe aliens are involved? Or, you know, God playing with his coloured pencils?
The Himba people of Namibia for centuries thought the circles were the footprints of their gods, or the work of an underworld dragon. Every time the dragon draws a breath and exhales, the fire rises to scorch the surface of the earth and another circle is born.
Since the 1920s, scientists have been trying to solve the Namibian mystery. The circles in WA were first studied in 2014, but the news of the discovery came out only last month, as a paper in the National Academy of Sciences, prompting detailed coverage by the Smithsonian Institute, Atlantic Monthly and Science. It's a big deal. The WA fairy circles have seemingly settled an argument between competing theories about how fairy circles are formed.
Is one theory about dragons and the other about fairies?
No, because the research has moved into, like, reality that can be tested. Among the ideas that have been ruled out: the circles are made by grazing ants (with a bent for large-scale formal abstraction); radioactive gases leaking from underground; or poisonous plants that kill off their competitors and the patch of earth they were standing in .
In March 2013, after he published his research findings, Professor Norbert Juergens, a biologist from the University of Hamburg, was hailed as the scientist who'd finally cracked the fairy code. Juergens argued that the grassland is eaten away, down to the roots, by sand termites; the circles they make are actually rain catchers. The termites, he said, were purposefully damming the plains, in circle after circle. In media interviews, Juergens liked to boast that termites were smarter than beavers. In his world, he was suddenly a rock star for a number of months.
So the termites, perfect circle – how did the professor come to this conclusion?
He went to Africa and dug trenches into the circles of dirt, two to 20 metres in diameter.
He found moisture beneath the surface, in every ring, even in the dry season. He figured a little creature was at work; after all, the fringe of grass was tall enough to be obscuring. Juergens argued that the circles were a little fort of sorts, purpose-built by the termites.
He also observed that the regular patterning of the circles was a result of this fort-like thinking of the termites. Their war-like competition was keeping the colonies equidistant.
Does Juergens still reign supreme as the circled genius?
He does not. Botanists agreed there was warfare going on, but between the plants, not termites. They talked of plants in a tug of war for water and nutrients. They said the land "self-organises" into rings of deep-rooted grasses that drain water from a central reservoir, leaving the surface dry and empty of life.
In August 2013, six months after Juergens made his splash, Michael Cramer, of the University of Cape Town, and Nichole Barger, of the University of Colorado Boulder, published a paper that found fairy circles occur only in places with low rainfall. Aerial photography found the circles grow after dry years, and shrink after wet ones.
In May 2014, Dr Stephan Getzin, an ecological modeller from the University of Goettingen – once devoted to the termite theory – published a paper, arguing that the hexagonal pattern was too exact to be the work of termites and ants. The aerial pictures had brought him to "self-organisation" as the truth of things.
Getzin, who has been quietly researching the Australian fairy circles, published the paper "Discovery of fairy circles in Australia supports self-organisation theory". Getzin found the honeycomb patterns in WA were the same as those in Namibia. The lack of rainfall also.
By measuring temperature and analysing soil samples, Getzin's team found evidence that deeper-rooted plants were making moats around themselves. Neighbouring plants shared in survival, more distant plants did not. The circles were what was left behind; hard and dry and unable to take any seed, they serve as rain-catchers. In the end, Juergens was half-right.
