On the Serengeti National Park ‘hunter and hunted’ conjures up a picture of a powerful tawny or spotted cat charging into a fleeing herd of soft-eyed gazelle. It’s true that these Great Plains are the best place to observe that primal and dramatic sight, but in fact almost every living thing here is either hunter or hunted – and often both Even to the most casual observer, the big cats, and the wild-dogs and hyenas, with their powerful or speedy bodies, their stabbing teeth and meat hook claws, are obviously well-designed killers.

But there are probably no more implacable hunters on the Serengeti than a pack of banded mongooses, there is no better designed killing machine than a praying mantis, and though spectacular, the large predators account for only a tiny proportion of the turnover of energy in the system.

The smaller cats, caracals and servals, the jackals and foxes, the mongooses and related genets, the birds of prey, from shrikes to crowned eagles and secretary birds, the hedgehogs, shrews, crocodiles and snakes make up a vast army of vertebrate hunters – hunting each other as relentlessly as they hunt other prey. The eagle owl will eat a hedgehog, the croc will eat a jackal, the secretary bird will eat a snake that has just eaten a mongoose…. who had just eaten a snake… who was full of shrew!

And further down the scale the ants operate in armies of hundreds of thousands, killing and pillaging on a scale that would be unwatchable if performed by higher animals.

And those soft-eyed gazelles – the classic example of the ‘hunted’ species .. they too are just the visible, high end of the hunted spectrum. Most plants are hunted too, and they have evolved ways of avoiding being eaten that are as varied as those used by animals. Some produce poisons that upset or even kill whoever eats them.

Other species that are good to eat hide among the unpalatable types, or keep their precious parts underground. Acacia trees produce masses of thorns to protect themselves, some of them provide homes for stinging ants to make feeding even more unpleasant. Some species produce tannins in their leaves within minutes of being heavily browsed, and even waft a chemical warning downwind that triggers other trees to defend them in a similar way, causing the browser to move on.

The hunters of plants have relentlessly evolved ways of dealing with those defenses. They dig up tubers, lubricate thorns with saliva, develop immunity to the toxins, or absorb them and use them in their own defense. Form follows function. The shape and speed of gazelle and the cheetah are plainly the result of an evolutionary race between hunter and hunted, but the acacia and the giraffe have just as clearly shaped each other. So when you visit the Serengeti look beyond the big cats and the thundering herds, the hunters and the hunted are all around you.

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