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
concerned about hippo welfare, but I'm also concerned about the welfare of Colombians who live there. And there's lots of rare and endangered species in Colombia. There's no easy solution here. From my perspective, my focus is on protecting hippos in Africa. And that's where we need to be focusing our resources.
So the idea of people have talked about like trying to send them to captive facilities, but It doesn't feel like a great use of resources to me because that's not really where they're supposed to be at all. The only reason they're there is because someone had hippos as pets.
They do. And I never have. I'm a vegetarian, but people do eat hippos. There are some groups of folks who have taboos in certain countries, in certain areas against eating hippos. But in most of the places where I've been, people do eat them. They have very thick fat layers and sort of like pigs. And I've heard that they are extremely yummy and, you know, people eat a lot of the parts.
And so that's a lot of meat for a lot of people.
And one of the threats to hippos is unregulated hunting. And in large part, it's because they just sit in the water. You can take them out with a muzzleloader, you know, an old gun. They're just sitting right there. And then you have 2000 pounds of meat. So in some places where there's been civil unrest or really hungry people, which makes a lot of sense, right?
Hippo populations have declined dramatically because people have needed to eat them to survive.
In general, I think the only predator they really are concerned about is people. They're not worried about crocs. That's when crocodiles, that's the question that comes up. People ask, oh, you know, crocodiles eat baby hippos. Crocodiles do not stand a chance in the water. Oh, really? Mom hippos are extremely protective.
as moms are in lots of places, that there's no chance that the crocodile's going to get them. I have seen lions taking down juvenile hippos, so I know that it happens, but I don't think it's particularly common.
The one best friend I can think of is a really cool mutualistic relationships between hippos and oxpeckers. So if you see hippos that are out of the water or just partially submerged, you'll often see a particular type of bird that sits on them. It's called an oxpecker that actually eats like ticks and other insects. So the bird gets free lunch and the hippo gets cleaned.
So that's definitely a friend. In terms of their social structure, I think they are really social animals themselves. We don't understand like who's related to who in those herds. Again, we can't barely tell them apart. And for most people, unless you spend a lot of time looking at hippos, you can't even tell males and females apart unless they open their mouths.
Their canine teeth for the males are much thicker. Their head structure is different, but like they're not sexually dimorphic, right? Sometimes males and females are really different sizes or different colors. They're all gray. They're all fat. They're all really big and you really can't tell males and females apart when they're mostly submerged.
Sometimes you'll see like creches, which is like groups of females and lots of offspring, like lots of calves, and they can play together in the water. But again, that's because there's these big groups where it's one dominant male and lots of females and their offspring.
That is definitely true. There is so much of it. And we actually think that hippo poop, and not just the poop itself, but all of the compounds like silica and silicon that's in there, are really important nutrients for the water areas, the wetlands, the rivers, the lakes where they live. And there's some evidence that when hippo populations decline, fish populations also decline.
It is true that hippos, when we ask, like, where does a hippo poop? The answer is anywhere it wants. Mostly it is in the water. But with males, we do see that marking behavior. Another crazy thing. Ready for this?
So what males do is they come out of the water, they start peeing, and then they spray it backwards. And then with their tail, use that to spread with the stream of the pee and the poop coming out. It's gross, and yet extremely effective. And I think it's territory marking, although we don't really know this, because we really only see males do that.
So we think they're marking their territory, you'll see it as they come out of the water, they kind of do this at a couple places, sometimes they'll smush it against like a tree, or, you know, a rock. And I and we think, again, we don't know this for sure. But we think it's dominant males marking their territory.
There's just spreading the love, right? They're spreading what they do best. And it is one of the things they do best. They're really important nutrient movers and ecosystem engineers in that way.
No, mostly when they're sleeping, they're resting above the water. So I remember I was thinking like, imagine there's sort of a log, that's the hippo's head. And so mostly when you see them resting, it's they're resting on the bottom. And that's one of the reasons why their nostrils are really at the end of the log, that's their head, is so they can breathe that way.
So they're only underwater, again, at like five to six minutes, maybe max at a time, it could easily be less. They're not sleeping underwater.
They look like logs, honestly, when you go to an area where there's a lot of hippos. And so there's sort of this like small top of the log, that's the hippo that you can see. That's them just sort of And actually I should say, are they sleeping? I don't know. They're certainly resting.
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