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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We don't 100% know what they're doing when they're in there in large part because it's not safe for us to get in there and find out.
Absolutely. It's an amazing technology that I think has changed a lot. One of the reasons that it's so hard to find out how many hippos we have, that seems like such a simple thing, just go count them like elephants. The problem is when you go do a flyover, right, you take pictures, that's one of the ways that we count, you know, animals in remote areas.
At any one time, there could be 30 to 40 percent of the populations that submerged. Right. They heard a noise and they got scared. And so now they're under the water. So you can't see them. And so drone technology has been amazing opportunity to be able to really count hippos and just get some basic questions like how many are there? Where are they? How are these numbers changing?
And I know it sounds really basic, but. for something that's the fifth largest land animal, we still don't have great data on that.
It is not a familiar term with me, but it does kind of make sense. There is certainly a dominant male. And again, people always say like, well, where are the rest of the guys? The rest of the guys live in a bachelor herd at some distance away from the rest of the herd. So it's literally all the other males. So
at some point juveniles get kicked out of the main pod and they have to go with the bachelors. And that's where all the other adult males go that aren't the dominant male. So you can find a bachelor herd that's associated with a large polygynous herd.
That's exactly it. That they're waiting for their roses. They're waiting for their turn at bat. And they, might challenge that male, right? And that's when you'll see those cool sort of like big gaping fights where they stand off and, you know, fight on the beach. So maybe that's the beach master.
It's very challenging to know how much sneaking there is, right? For a lot of species where there's like a dominant male or even monogamous couples, there's still extra pair copulations, we call it. And I don't know how much sneaking there is. So it's possible that those bachelor males sneak and get access to the females, but we don't know.
And that's something that if we could get like tissue samples or be able to do genetic testing to be able to kind of figure out lineages or which calves are related to which parents. It's so hard to get to them. And it's almost impossible to tell them apart. Hippos just don't have any structures. It's rude probably to say they all look alike, but to our eye, they really do.
I have touched hippos in captivity. I have touched dead hippos. I have not touched a live hippo in the wild. I've never been that close or in, you know, I wouldn't do that, but it's a great question. Like, how do we get samples? Another question is like, why don't you just put a collar on them? What's the big deal? Go figure out where they go on the collar front.
Turns out hippos don't have a neck. Most of the collars go around the neck. They don't have a neck. What they have is a head that's attached to the rest of their barrel-shaped body. You can't put a collar on them. So most of the technology that we have for tracking rhinos or tracking elephants won't work on hippos.
In fact, a colleague of mine, the first tag that we put, and it wasn't a collar tag. It was like a tag that they attached... just on the skin, wasn't until 2013. And it stayed on for like a kilometer. Amazing feat, but really, really hard. So hard to figure out where they're going. And to get samples from them.
The other thing about hippos, remember we talked about they're amazing from head to tail. They have one of the thickest hides or skins of any animal. hands down. In fact, people used to use hippo skin to make whips because they are the most durable and hardest. So actually even getting a dart or something like that into a hippo, very, very hard.
They are not. Nope.
They don't sweat blood, but it is sort of a reddish orange pigment. And that is something that people have isolated because they were able to get it off a captive hippo. And a fantastic group of scientists from Japan in 2004 was able to extract some and figure out like, molecularly, chemically, what's going on here. And it's just, as you said, it's not blood.
It is a secretion, but it is a sunscreen and probably an antibiotic. Oh. And we think that that secretion both protects them from the sun, which we know is very important. We talked about hippos, the need for water and important for their thermal regulation, but also that secretion seems to be an important antibiotic.
I wish I had it, right? I could really use that sunscreen.
You know, I've asked for a couple other places. Like she does seem to have a very lively personality. Nothing that she's done that I've seen, it seems like out of the ordinary. Anybody who's taken care of kids, like they open their mouth all the time. They're pretty demanding and they want attention. And she seems to be extremely healthy and just, you know, a lively pygmy hippo.
One thing that's been wonderful about having Mudang on the scene is that people know about pygmy hippos. And a lot of people maybe didn't even know they existed. They're not just smaller common hippos. This is a separate species. It's endangered. And, you know, I think This will be the only opportunity for most people to ever see a pygmy hippo.
In fact, even people who study pygmy hippos, again, we only got pictures of them in the wild in 2006 from remote cameras, not a person with a camera, a camera out there by itself. There's so much we don't know. And I think that having more people aware of pygmy hippos is great. The thing that really upset me about the story is knowing that people threw things in the enclosure.
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