Lake Natron was designated a Wetlands of International Importance under the Ramsar Convention in 2001 according to Article 2 of the Ramsar Convention. They may represent the only survivors who were able to successfully adapt as the lake acquired its uniquely hostile characteristics. These organisms may be evolutionary descendants of animals who lived on the lake before its current chemical environment arose. It appears to contain a stable ecosystem consisting of a population of endangered flamingos, some species of fish, and algae. The poor creatures appeared to have turned to stone in the highly caustic waters of Tanzania’s Lake Natron specifically due to the high amounts of sodium carbonate in the lake. Re-animated, alive again in death.”ĭespite its inhospitable environment, the lake is not lifeless. You may remember the eerie black and white photographs of calcified birds that went viral a couple years ago. “I took these creatures as I found them on the shoreline, and then placed them in ‘living’ positions, bringing them back to ‘life’, as it were. “The notion of portraits of dead animals in the place where they once lived, placed in positions as if alive again in death, was just too compelling to ignore,” Brandt said of his decision to photograph the animals. It is around 60 km long and is fed mainly by the. Lake Natron is a salt lake located in northern Tanzania, close to the Kenyan border, in the eastern branch of Africa’s Great Rift Valley. “There was never any possibility of bending a wing or turning a head to make a better pose - they were like rock,” he said, “so we took them and placed them on branches and rocks just as we found them, always with a view to imagining it as a portrait in death.”Ī fish eagle © Nick Brandt 2013, Courtesy of Hasted Kraeutler Gallery, NY Its shores are littered with the calcified corpses of a variety of birds and bats that had met their untimely demise after crashing into the deadly lake. The creatures, he said, were “rock hard” from the calcification. The entire fish eagle was the most surprising and revelatory find,” Brandt, who photographed these calcified animals in 20, told The Huffington Post in an email Wednesday. Brandt stated that when he saw those animals beside the lake, it shook him completely. “Discovering these animals washed up along the shoreline of Lake Natron, I thought they were extraordinary - every last tiny detail perfectly preserved down to the tip of a bat’s tongue, the minute hairs on his face.
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