Dr. Rebecca Lewison
speaker
136 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Dr. Rebecca Lewison’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Rebecca Lewis in She, Her.
I started studying hippos as a graduate student. I was at UC Davis doing my PhD in ecology, and I kind of stumbled into this project to work on hippos. My interest in was to study behavioral ecology. At the time, I just really loved, it was fascinated by sort of the minutia of animal behavior. And I thought, oh, this will be perfect.
I'll study hippos, which anyone who actually studies behavior will be laughing when they hear this because you think like, no, no, no, no. You study behavior on small things like birds or squirrels, not hippos.
But I had this opportunity because I had spent time in Kenya as an undergrad and so could speak some Swahili and had traveled around and just had a fair amount of field experience. And so I got this amazing opportunity and kind of just fell into it and didn't realize what I was getting into at the time and sort of entering this amazing world of this understudied animal.
You can't study it in the lab. You can't manipulate it at all. They're actually really hard to study, period, because they spend almost all their time in the water. You couldn't pick something less studyable if you tried.
Who didn't play Hungry, Hungry Hippo as a kid?
What are they eating? Are they eating mostly plants? They are eating mostly plants. So they are herbivores. They eat grass. So we can be a little bit more specific than that. They're basically like lawnmowers. They eat a tremendous amount of grass and it has to be pretty short grass. Why? Well, because it's just wait till we unpack this.
Like hippos are amazing head to tail, but they don't really have a neck. They don't really have any structures in the back of that part of their spine. So they can't really lift their heads up like when you think of like giraffes or elephants. They can't do that. So they're really limited by the grass height.
Yes, that's a great question. And it's a little bit of a yes. They do forage on the banks. But what you'll see if you're in a place where there are a lot of hippos is you really know a lot about where hippos are going because they have these trails. And you can look down on the trail and see like a hippo print, another hippo print. So they just follow these trails for a really long time.
So they're really well established to what we call grazing lawns. So areas of short grass that are some distance away from usually the water where they're in.
Yeah, it's crazy. We think they eat somewhere between like maybe 50 to 100 pounds. We don't 100% know because it's hard to tell. And obviously in captivity, their diet is much better. You'll see them like eating watermelon or pumpkins, you know, if you've seen the videos. So they're not necessarily super particular on the species of grass, just the height of the grass.
So I think these grazing lawns are there because of them. And they continue to get mowed down by hippos. And they're pretty long lived. So I'm sure they have a lot of information that they store. And if you want to study, like if you were a graduate student and you were captivated by foraging behavior, that's what you do. You'd follow the paths. You'd sit in a vehicle and you'd get some...
crude night scope and you'd watch them for hours and hours and hours. And that's basically what I did. Are they nocturnal? Yes. They only come out of the water at night. What? And we think that's because of thermoregulation, right? They're adapted to be in the water. They don't do well if there isn't standing water and they'll die without that. So in the dry season.
And so for most of the year, they are only coming out of the water at you know, when it's dusk and getting dark. So yeah, what I would do is sit, I would drive my Land Rover to the place where that foraging lawn was and then I would sit on the roof with a pretty old school night scope and watch them forage. That was, that's what I did for about a year.
I have some crazy stories of falling asleep and like waking up to elephants at my eye level because I would fall asleep. Like you said, I wasn't getting enough sleep. But yes, I would sleep during the day and try to stay up. And I would have to do it when there was some full moon because it was really crude. It was, you know, mid 90s. So we had night scopes, but nothing like we do now.
The incredible thing is what I remember doing is picking my head up and I'm literally at eye level because I was on the top of this pickup truck and I literally just picked my head up. I saw an elephant and I was so tired. I just put my head down and went back to sleep. No. Yeah.
I think I woke up in the morning and I definitely was like, What? But, you know, for people who work in the field and yeah, obviously I was careful and, you know, followed all the protocols I was supposed to follow, but amazing things happen.
So I'm going to say it out loud and then people are going to think like, what scientists do, what? But I was actually counting the number of bites and steps. I know, I say it out loud and I just think, what? And it does sound like minutiae to me too, but it's fascinating. Like we know what we do. What do hippos do? How far do they go? Can they just go anywhere?
Like you were asking those questions initially. So I spent all this time trying to understand sort of their strategy. How do they make it work? How do they get enough? How do they decide where to go? And how do you make choices about where to forage?
They don't. Hippos in captivity, all the accredited places that hippos are living, takes amazing care of the animals. They give them lettuce and pumpkins and watermelon and amazing things and very, very well fed. But no, nothing like that happens to hippos in the wild.
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