Dromedary - Habitat and Distribution

Habitat and Distribution

The dromedary camel occupies arid regions, notably the Sahara desert in Africa. The original range of the camel’s wild ancestors was probably south Asia and the Arabian peninsula. They inhabit the dry hot regions of north Africa, Ethiopia, Near East and western to central Asia. All African camels are dromedaries, of which 84% occur in Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Djibouti and Kenya, which constitutes 60.1% of the world's whole camel population. In the Horn of Africa, the dromedary can occur as far south as 2°S, where the annual rainfall may be 550 mm (22 in). The dromedary overlaps in distribution with the Bactrian camel in Afghanistan, Pakistan and southwest Asia. Richard Bulliet has observed that dromedaries exist where the Bactrian camel do not, and Bactrian camels exist where dromedaries do not occur. He concluded this can be because the nomads of Syrian and Arabian deserts valued the dromedary more, whereas Asiatic people raised the Bactrian camel.

Today they are commonly found in African, Arabian, Indian and Middle Eastern deserts. Extinct in the wild, today all dromedaries are domesticated. There are about 15 million domesticated dromedaries. The dromedary camel is also found in feral populations in northern Australia, where it was introduced in 1840. Populations survive in the Canary Islands, where they were exported in 1405. Attempts had been made to introduce dromedaries into the Caribbean, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia and Brazil; some were imported to the western United States in the 1850s and some to Namibia in the early 1900s, but today they exist in none of these areas. Short-term home ranges of feral camels in Australia are 50-150 square kilometers, and annual home ranges are estimated to be several thousand kilometres.