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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And it's a bummer for them because those canine teeth actually do have ivory. Oh. So it's not as high quality as elephants, but it's one of the reasons that hippos have gotten wrapped up in the ivory trade. or legal ivory trade is because they're canines. So those are the ones that are sort of the curved ones coming out of their bottom jaw have Ivory, made of ivory, yeah.
All right. You ready? They aren't even swimming. No. They can't swim. They sort of glide, walk, run along the bottom. So they're never in deep water? They can be in deep water. They can be submerged. They can stay under for about five to six minutes, but they're not actually swimming. I guess if you think about like if you were doing aqua aerobics.
I was just going to say, this is like going to the Y. What? Yeah. Don't try this with them, but it is just like that.
Yeah, that's a really good question. What are they doing under there? So one thing, remember we talked about them being related to whales. They have nostrils on the top of their... So if you look at a hippo, let's see, how do I describe this?
And they actually have muscular and anatomical features that are similar to blowholes. So the nostrils close when they go underwater. And when they come up, one of the ways you know that there's a hippo there is because you hear the right, when they blow out. And so that's similar to what we see with cetaceans, right, when they come up and they're blowholes.
So there's actually some characteristics of their nostrils that are similar to that. What do they do underwater? It's hard to know because we really, it's very hard to see. Jacques Cousteau famously like put this fake hippo and people have tried this, like deploy like a autonomous, you know, vehicle in the water dressed up as a hippo.
It doesn't go very well for the daughter of the vehicle, right? The hippos are just like, no, get that thing out of here. So it's pretty hard to see what they're doing. And mostly they're in water that is not clear. You can't see anything.
I do want to say as I, because I think I have to represent for the hippos on this one, that more hippos die as a result of hippo human conflict than humans, which is not to underestimate the devastation that happens when there's a fatality, but I don't think hippos are naturally aggressive to people. The biggest threat that they face is habitat loss. They rely on fresh water.
We rely on fresh water. We want to put a farm next to a river because that's where it's easy to grow crops. That's where they live. They're obligate in the water. They have to be there. So it's not like they can just pick up and move. There has been an increase in hippo human fatalities recently. And I think it's really just an indication of habitat loss.
Yeah, it definitely happens with people fishing in boats. It happens with tourists in boats. It does sometimes happen on land because hippos are crop raiders. Turns out they love eating. We just said they love pumpkins. If you plant some, they'll come eat them. It's not usually pumpkins, but like corn or beans. They do a lot of crop breeding to their defense.
You put the food right next to where they live.
Yeah. And much higher quality nutritionally than anything else that they're eating. So it makes sense to them. But it's a definite problem and it's really tough to develop deterrents. you know, people talk about electric fences, but a lot of this is happening in places where there might not be electricity or a lot of infrastructure.
And so it's a real challenge to figure out how to get hippos and humans to coexist.
Common hippos are in 38 countries. And so it's a challenge to to get all that information. But our best guess is probably something around 130,000, which is not a lot. In the world? Yeah. I mean, well, recently we only count the ones in Africa.
Yeah, in Africa. And that's about probably a third of the amount of elephants that we have. And so it's a real issue. And the problem is when I would tell people, oh, I study hippos. First of all, that's crazy. And we're concerned because their numbers are declining.
If you're in a place where there are a lot of hippos, someone's going to turn around behind you and be like, excuse me, do you see that large group of like 50 to 100 hippos? But they aggregate. And so it may seem like there's a lot of them, but there's been a tremendous amount of loss of habitat. And, you know, 130,000 is not very many.
Yeah. I think most people know, like I said, sort of East African countries, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, South Africa, Botswana has a lot of hippos. The place that we know hippos are probably most vulnerable right now is West African countries because there's much more population growth, less habitat for hippos, a lot more pressure on freshwater resources.
And so I think there's probably people in countries like Nigeria or Guinea or Guinea-Bissau that they may not even know that they have common hippos because they exist in such low densities.
And there's some disagreement of whether there are or aren't subspecies. But there are potentially as many for subspecies.
There aren't very many of us. And part of it is because hippos are really hard to study. They're these animals that are hiding in plain sight. They're in the water during the day. It's very difficult to tell them apart, right? With elephants, we have big ears that you can identify individuals and you just can't. And they're just not on a lot of radars for conservation organizations.
Showing 41–60 of 136 · page 3 of 7
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