If you were to travel through areas of mopane woodland in the heat of the day and wished to stop and rest in the shade, you would have trouble finding any! To save water, the leaflets fold together and present the smallest surface area toward the sun, thereby reducing exposure of the leaf surface. This also prevents much shade from being cast. The mopane is often deciduous in winter, possibly another adaptation to drought, since winters are not very cold in the lowveld, but they are dry. The lovely reddish new leaves only emerge in October in anticipation of the first rains. Game animals, particularly elephants, enjoy the protein-rich leaves and pods. Elephant pressure may be part of the reason for the stunted appearance of some areas of mopane scrub. Domestic animals find the pungent leaves unpalatable at first but will feed on them once used to the taste, and their meat and milk is apparently untainted with a turpentine flavour. The young leaves have a higher protein content and are more palatable, but even the dry, fallen leaves yield valuable protein for stock and game.

Hole-nesting birds such as hornbills favour mopane woodlands as they offer many nesting sites. 'Mopane manna' is picked off the leaves by people and baboons. This is a sweet-tasting, waxy cover on the juvenile stage of a sap-sucking insect (related to leaf-hoppers) known as the mopane psyllid, Arytaina mopani. The well-known mopane worm, which is the large caterpillar of the Imbrasia belina emperor moth, the Gonometa moth and the caterpillar of the foxy charaxes butterfly, Charaxes jasius saturnus, feed on the mopane. The tiny mopane bee, Plebina denoita, which many know from its (sometimes successful) attempts at crawling into one's eyes, ears and nose, produces a small amount of edible honey. They make their nests in hollow trunks with a small wax tube as the opening to the outside. Mopane seed pods do not split open of their own accord and the seeds can germinate while still in the pod.