Mammals
Dromedary Camel
Camelus dromedarius · also called Arabian camel, one-humped camel
The dromedary is the camel of the hot deserts — the one-humped animal of Arabia, the Sahara, and the Horn of Africa that has carried people and goods across some of the driest land on Earth for five thousand years. Almost every one alive is domesticated or descended from domestic stock.
Overview
Dromedaries are adapted to arid and semi-arid country — sand desert, gravel plains, dry grassland, and scrub. As domestic animals they are kept across North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, the Sahel, East Africa, Iran, Pakistan, and northwestern India, for transport, milk, meat, hair, and racing. The wild dromedary is extinct; the only substantial free-living population is the feral herd in Australia.
Desert engineering
The dromedary is a case study in coping with heat and drought:
- The hump stores fat centrally, providing energy for lean times and keeping insulating fat off the rest of the body so heat can escape.
- Fluctuating body temperature. Rather than sweating to stay cool, the camel lets its core temperature drift up by as much as 6–7 °C over the day and dumps that heat to the cold desert night, saving enormous amounts of water.
- Water handling. Oval red blood cells that keep flowing when the blood thickens, kidneys that produce syrupy urine, dry faeces, moisture-recapturing nostrils, and a tolerance for 25% body-water loss — then the ability to drink 100+ litres in one session.
- Physical protection. Double rows of long eyelashes, sealable slit nostrils, thick lips for eating thorns, and broad two-toed feet with leathery pads that spread on soft sand.
Diet
Dromedaries are browsers and grazers that thrive on plants livestock like cattle and sheep cannot use — dry, woody, thorny, and salty vegetation — extracting maximum nutrition through a three-chambered stomach and slow, thorough rumination. This lets herders keep camels in country that supports almost nothing else.
Domestication and people
Domesticated in the Arabian Peninsula around 3000 BCE, the dromedary transformed trade and travel across the deserts of Africa and Asia, making long caravan routes — including the trans-Saharan gold and salt trade — possible. Today the roughly 35 million domestic dromedaries remain central to pastoral economies, and camel milk, meat, and high-value racing animals are a growing industry in the Gulf.
Status
As a domestic animal the dromedary is Not Evaluated by the IUCN and is abundant and increasing. The conservation issues attached to it are indirect: the feral Australian population is managed as a pest for its impact on fragile desert ecosystems, and its wild two-humped relative, the wild Bactrian camel, is Critically Endangered.
Dromedary Camel: common questions
What is actually inside a camel's hump?
Fat, not water. The hump is a concentrated energy reserve of up to about 36 kg, which the camel draws on when food is scarce — as it does, the hump shrinks and slumps to one side. Storing the body's fat in one place instead of spread under the skin also helps the camel shed heat from the rest of its body. Metabolising that fat does release some water as a by-product, but the "camels store water in their hump" idea is a myth.
How do camels survive without drinking?
Through water conservation rather than water storage. A camel lets its body temperature rise several degrees during the day so it does not have to sweat, produces very dry dung and concentrated urine, loses little moisture when breathing thanks to special nasal passages that recapture it, and can tolerate losing a quarter of its body weight to dehydration — a level that would kill most mammals. When it finally reaches water it can rehydrate completely in one long drink. In cool weather with green forage, a working camel can go weeks without drinking.
What is the difference between a dromedary and a Bactrian camel?
The dromedary (Camelus dromedarius) has one hump and is native to the hot deserts of Arabia and North Africa. The Bactrian camel (Camelus bactrianus) has two humps, a shaggier coat, and is built for the cold deserts and steppes of Central Asia. A separate species, the wild Bactrian camel, survives in tiny numbers in the Gobi and is Critically Endangered. Dromedaries make up about 94% of the world's camels.
Why are there wild camels in Australia?
Dromedaries were imported to Australia from the 1840s as pack animals for exploring and building in the arid interior, along with cameleers mostly from present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan. When motor vehicles replaced them in the early 20th century, many were released or escaped. With no predators and vast suitable habitat, the feral population grew to over a million — the largest wild dromedary herd on Earth — and is now managed as an invasive species that damages native vegetation and water sources.