![]() For one, hippos are much larger, weighing in at around two to three times the weight of a rhino. However, these two animals have some notable differences. “This study suggests that there is some urgency to deciding what to do about them,” he says.Hippos and rhinos are both mammals, which means they are warm-blooded, have fur or hair, and produce milk to feed their young. ![]() The process of moving just one juvenile hippo to a Colombian zoo in 2018 cost around $4,500, reports National Geographic.īut as Shurin explains, dealing with a few dozen hulking, poop-happy hippos will be easier than trying to manage a few thousand. “And people like animals.”īut wrangling the volatile creatures so they can be relocated or castrated is challenging, dangerous and expensive. The last option is not a palatable one: “People like that attract tourists,” Shurin tells the Los Angeles Times. The main possibilities are sterilizing them, capturing and relocating them, or killing them. Just what should be done about the hippos is a sticky issue. “The effects of hippos on the aquatic environment that we observe suggest that sustained population growth poses a threat to water quality in lakes and rivers as they expand their range throughout Magdalena Medio watershed and potentially colonize new regions on the Caribbean slope of Colombia,” he and his colleagues write in the new study. If allowed to breed unchecked, “there could be thousands of ” within the next few decades, says Shurin in the statement. But that might change as the animals continue to multiply. Speaking to Christie Wilcox of National Geographic, Shurin notes that the differences he observed between hippo and non-hippo lakes were “measurable, but not dramatic.” The quantities and variety of invertebrates or zooplankton do not seem to have yet been impacted. “That can make life harder for plants and animals that have adapted to an ecosystem without the big, toothy mammals,” writes Hester. In hippo habitats, according to Jessica Leigh Hester of Atlas Obscura, “the amount of dissolved oxygen sometimes dipped below the level that fish can handle.” What’s more, just by moving their chunky bodies around, hippos can alter their environment, creating channels that give water more places to pool. ![]() Other signs also suggest that the animals are changing the chemistry of local water bodies. This is disconcerting, says Shurin in a statement, because it “can lead to problems like eutrophication, or excess algae production that can lead to harmful algal blooms similar to red tides.” They found that cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae, was more prevalent in hippo-filled lakes, likely because the nutrients in mass quantities of hippo poop fertilize bacteria. The researchers sampled water from 14 small lakes around Hacienda Nápoles, comparing water quality, oxygen levels and stable isotope signatures in lakes with hippos to those without. Just how hippos impact ecosystems in the South American nation remained unclear-so the group embarked on a two-year journey to find out. But in Colombia, where the animals are now invasive, “the environment is wetter and water levels less seasonally variable,” as Shurin and a team of researchers write in the journal Ecology. In their native African habitat, hippos’ prolific bathroom behavior can be beneficial, transporting nutrients like silicon from land into water. “Then they come into the water and crap all day.” “They only eat on land,” Jonathan Shurin, a biologist at the University of California, San Diego, tells Peter Rowe of the Los Angeles Times. ![]() Now numbering between 65 and 80 individuals, this herd of lumbering creatures may pose a problem to Colombia’s aquatic ecosystems-a poopy problem, to be precise. They formed a feral population in both artificial lakes and the Magdalena River, and have since been spotted as far as 93 miles away from the estate. Left to their own devices, the hippos began roaming Hacienda Nápoles, as the property is known, and beyond. But the hippos, of which Escobar was said to be particularly fond, were deemed too aggressive and dangerous to move. After Escobar was shot dead in 1993, the country’s government seized control of his estate and relocated most of the animals living there to zoos. In 1978, drug lord Pablo Escobar purchased a sprawling Colombian estate that he filled with an assortment of extravagant and unusual features-among them a soccer field statues of dinosaurs a bullfighting arena and a menagerie filled with rhinos, giraffes, zebras and four hippos.
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