New highway to cut the Serengeti in half?

June 2010. Perhaps the best known of all the Game reserves, the Serengeti is contiguous with Kenya's Masai Mara, yet this huge area in Tanzania is six times the size. Most famous for the vast herds of wildebeest that follow a migration route around the Serengeti and into the Masai Mara, and the big cats that accompany them.

Masai Mara lions to disappear in 20 years?

However reports now circulating on the web suggest that the Government of Tanzania has given the go ahead for a road to be built right across the Serengeti, potentially blocking the migration route of the wildebeest, threatening the wildlife with a large amount of high speed traffic and providing easy access to many poachers.

Purely constructing the highway will cause untold damage, even if a single vehicle never used it. Heavy construction traffic, pollution, noise, work gangs and vast disruption to the wildlife. 

If the road goes ahead, we  may not see scenes like  this in the future.

Wildlife Extra has tried to find out more about this, but the Tanzanian Embassy in London had no knowledge of the plan, and the Tanzanian Parks Authority has, as yet, not answered our enquiry.

Consequences for the Masai Mara
If the highway goes ahead, it could potentially halt the famous wildebeest migration which would have dire consequences.

• The wildebeest migrate in order to find better grazing, which appears after the rains which move around. If the herds cannot follow the rains, hundreds of thousands of wildebeest could potentially die.
• If the wildebeest numbers are massively reduced, the numbers of big cats and other predators will crash in a similar manner.
• If the road prevents the wildebeest reaching the Masai Mara, there will be major implications for the environment there, as well as the communities that rely on tourism.

There is an online petition that you can join in protest to the proposed highway.