Within a few weeks hundreds of fruits hang like ripe melons among the bare branches. The fruit, which is called monkey bread, is the favorite food of baboons. A tribe of baboons will arrive at the tree in the morning and spend the day feeding among its branches, cracking open the hard shells, scooping out the pulp, and letting the seeds and shells fall to the ground. Even when the fruit has fallen and the baboons are gone, and the tree seems still and quiet, life moves among its branches. Boomslang snakes search for insects and lizards.
Bees make honey within the trunk.
And, as the dry season stretches on, elephants come to the baobab tree and begin to eat their way through its bark and its wood, extracting water from the pulpy fiber. If the dry season lasts, they can strip away all the bark they can reach, and they can eat their way through so much wood that they leave large, gaping holes through the trunk. But the baobab heals its wounds, produces new bark, and is able to keep growing. The hollows which are left often become water reservoirs within the tree, storing thousands of gallons of water. As they travel through the arid grasslands where the baobab grows, the people of the bush may draw on these reservoirs for water.