Weird Pattern Similarity Between Desert 'Fairy Circles,' Skin Cells

It’s pretty strange for patterns to appear both on a large and a small scale in nature. But it’s even weirder when it involves fairy circles, those circular patches of bare land in Africa’s Namib Desert, whose origins have long been a subject of murky speculation.

As it turns out, though, researchers at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University in Japan have found that fairy circles share a similar pattern with something tiny and seemingly completely unrelated to them: human skin cells.

“It’s a completely amazing, strange match,” OIST professor Robert Sinclair, who heads the school’s mathematical biology unit, said in a press release.

While the location of fairy circles in the desert may seem random, it turns out that they closely match the distribution pattern of skin cells. Researchers took satellite images of fairy circles, and then used a computer to draw lines halfway between each pair of circles to designate invisible boundaries, much like cell walls. The computer then counted how many neighbors surround each fairy circle. They then compared that number to previous researchers’ calculations about skin cells.

The results were startlingly close to identical. Most fairy circles and skin cells have six neighbors, but the percentage with four, five, six, seven, eight and nine neighbors is essentially the same as the skin cells.

The big question is why this similarity exists, and the researchers don’t yet have an answer for it.  Even so, ”the fact that they are similar is already very important,” Sinclair said. “This is suggesting there may be such types of patterns that cover really different size scales.”

Various explanations — none conclusively proven — have been proposed for fairy circles, ranging from zebras rolling around on the ground to ants and termites, to grass-killing gases. In 2013, scientists proposed that they might be caused by subsurface competition for resources among plants.

From Discovery News