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
So they haven't gotten a lot of funding. The hippo community is thin on the ground. Oh. Well, you mentioned big ears.
That is a good question. We don't really know, but it could have to do with the fact that most animals that develop in the water, like sea lions, have pretty tiny ears, right? And so I think we don't tend to see animals that have, you know, come up evolutionarily in the water with big ears.
I have been on it.
I don't remember engaging too many people, but I certainly told my whole family and the people I was with, this is not accurate. There's a lot of that. The one thing people ask me when they find out that I work on hippos is kind of where we started. Do they really kill more people than any African animal? I don't know who started that, but it certainly wasn't me. And I don't think it's accurate.
It is not fact-based. I think snakes kill way more people than hippos. I think the reason it started sort of this urban legend is because it's surprising. It's surprising that for people to know how fast they move on land. And the answer is faster than us. You know, maybe 19, 20 miles an hour they can run. They can move extremely fast in the water.
And I think that there has been an increase in hippo-human conflict. And that takes people by surprise because they're not particularly aggressive, I think, naturally. I think what we're really seeing is habitat loss. They're under tremendous pressure. And so the number of attacks is on the rise. But I just want to tell people now, I don't think hippos kill humans.
more people than any other African animal.
Yes, exactly. That's who started this whole thing. It was the mosquito lobby trying to point the finger at hippos.
I don't think that's true, Debra. Okay. I think bubbles and wiggling is not the thing you have to worry about. I think the real thing you have to worry about, people ask me like, what do I do to sort of like fend off an attack? And you know, the answer is like, wait, why are you in a place where hippos can attack you? The thing we need to do is avoid them and not be in those spaces.
Now, if you're a commercial fisherman in an area that has hippos, you know, it's a different situation, but most of us aren't.
No, they are not monogamous. They don't mate for life. And in fact, they don't really form bonds like that. So hippos are something called polygynous, which means there's a single male, the dominant male, and lots of females that he probably mates with. Hello, ladies. And that herd is like that, sort of with one male and lots of females until...
another dominant male comes over and challenges that hippo for that territory so when you see the you know national geographic pictures of two hippos with big gapes sort of going at it with those big teeth we were talking about like what those are for those are territory fights for control over one of those polygynous herds got it they're kind of like in a bar fight
Exactly.
And the answer is we know almost nothing about hippo communication. Why not? They're communicating in the air like we are, but they're also communicating in the water. And we don't really understand how they're doing it. We can record them. And people have done that. And they describe sort of clicks and other types of noises underwater.
Like that, right? It's not a great one. I'm probably not going to call them in. But I think it's these crazy noises. And we really don't know anything about what it means, what they're saying, how they're even communicating in the water.
I think it's interesting because honestly, it just feels like one of the wonderful mysteries of hippos, but it's also one of the things that's kept them, I think, off the radar and kept them sort of in this area of we see you, but we don't know anything about you. It's just that they're so tough to study.
Yeah, it's a really crazy, crazy thing. So if you're just new to this, Pablo Escobar, who is a very famous narco trafficker, had four hippos, three females and one male on his ranch and compound. And upon his death in 1993, for some reason, they just left them.
Cut to this many years later. And now there's probably around 200 hippos roaming wild in this area of Columbia called the Magdalena River. Turns out it's a great place to be a hippo. Oh, no. So hippos do really well under good conditions. It's one of the reasons why hippos can start having babies like four years earlier in captivity. It's because the conditions are so good.
So that's what we think happened in Colombia. There's grass everywhere. It's never a dry season. They never lose water availability. There's unlimited food, unlimited resources, and that's why we've seen this population explode. So what do we do now that there are 200 and maybe more hippos in Colombia? It's a really tough problem.
There have been some suggestions and solutions that they've tried, but all of them take a lot of money. They've tried darting some with contraception. They've tried castrating some of the males. They have actually culled one individual, so they've shot him. And that may sound terrible to some people, and I'm obviously not
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