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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Yeah, we think they live around 30 to 40 years in the wild. And in captivity, they can live quite a bit longer.
Okay, so memory said they are incredible head to toe. So they have incredible stomachs. So anyone who's like fascinated by stomachs, there's not going to be a very large slice of listeners, but
They have all this interesting stomach structures that actually is similar to what cows have. They are not ruminants, but they do have this like blind sack. They have like this three chambered stomach, but they do something similar to ruminants. So they don't have like cud, but they keep things in their stomach a really long time.
And I think that gets to your question, like way more than elephants are like conveyor belts. It goes in and it goes out. And if you see an elephant poop, I don't know who has, but you'll notice like, oh, I know what that is. It looks just like what they just took in. But for hippos, not so. So it really breaks down a lot so that this three-chambered stomach has this ability to extract resources.
So even though 50 to 100 pounds sounds a lot for wild hippos, like you said, they're size of a VW bus. And so they're using this three-chambered stomach structure to extract all the nutrients and keep things in their stomach kind of a long time.
So they're about like 2,500 to 3,000 pounds. In the wild.
Really, really quite a bit smaller. Yeah.
Absolutely.
This is the reason most people don't. It's because pygmy hippos are only in West African countries. And even within West African countries, they're only in four of them. And they're very, very secretive.
So we think of common hippos right there, this iconic animal of the African savanna, right? You'll see a picture of like a big hippo gaping with a sunset behind it. Until 2006, we hadn't even ever had a picture of pygmy hippos in the wild.
And it's because they're very rare, right? They're an endangered animal. And there used to be a very large forest complex there. in Sierra Leone and Liberia and Guinea and Cote d'Ivoire that kind of went over that entire region. It's largely been lost or there's been a lot of habitat loss of that forest. And that's what pygmy hippos rely on. They're also solitary.
So they don't do this big group aggregation that we see with common hippos. So it's not surprising. They're secretive and solitary cryptic forest animals. And there's very, very few of them.
San Diego Zoo, you know, fantastic zoo. When I used to go with my kids and we'd be standing at the pygmy hippo, people would say, oh, these are just baby hippos.
What did you say? I corrected everybody, whether they wanted it or not. But they do look, honestly, to me, they look very different. But I can understand why people maybe think they're the same thing, only smaller. So for everyone listening, they're absolutely not. Pygmy hippos are a separate species. And actually, evolutionarily, they split. from common hippos like millions of years ago.
So it's convergent evolution? Yeah. And a lot of the structures that they have are not that similar. But one of the things that I know people sometimes get fascinated about common hippos is that they are most closely related to whales and cetaceans. No. No.
Yes. And we know this from all lines of evidence. It used to just be morphology, morphological evidence, and they did looking at fossils and different parts of the animals. But as Science progressed and we started using genetic information. They've used all sorts of genetic tests to demonstrate that they are in fact sister taxa, cetaceans and hippos. No.
Why are their mouths so big? That's a good question, actually. So pygmy hippos don't have the gait like common hippos do, right? Common hippos have like 180. They can actually open their jaws that much.
And it is a good question why, because it's not like they're eating pumpkins and big things in the wild. I will say that male hippos, sometimes you'll see male hippos engaged in what looks like, we're going to say like this mortal combat. I don't think it usually results in mortality, but they do use their gape
both, I think, against other hippos, you know, if they're having a territorial fight, and other animals. They're pretty badass. How big are their teeth? Well, so they have different types of teeth. They have sort of molars, and then they have canines, which come up, which can be 9 or 10 inches. And then they also have incisors. The canines are actually most similar to elephant tusks.
What are they used for? Again, it's probably just some type of defense.
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