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Hippopotamus

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The Hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius) or Greek "ίππόποταμος" ("river horse") is a large, plant-eating African mammal, one of only two living and three (or four) recently extinct species in the family Hippopotamidae.

Characteristics

Hippopotamuses ('hippopotami' is also accepted as a plural form by the OED), also called hippos, are gregarious, living in groups of up to 40 animals called a pod, herd, school or a bloat. A male hippo is known as a bull; the female, a cow; a baby, a calf. A hippo's lifespan is commonly 40 to 50 years. Female hippos will reach sexual maturity at 5 to 6 years and have a gestation period of 8 months.

Hippos average 3.5 metres (11 ft) long, 1.5 metres (5 ft) tall at the shoulder, and weigh from 1,500 kg to 3,200 kg (3,300 to 7,000 lb). They are approximately the same size as the White Rhinoceros, and experts are split on which is the next largest land animal after the elephant. Male hippos appear to continue growing throughout their lives, whereas the females reach a maximum weight at around the age of 25. Females are smaller than their male counterparts, and normally weigh no more than 1,500 kg. The value given above of 3,200 kg is often quoted for the upper limit of weight for a male hippo. However, larger specimens than this have been documented, one of which weighed almost five tonnes. Even though they are a bulky animal, hippos can run faster than a human on land. There are estimates of its actual running speed varying from 30 km/h (18 mph) to 40 km/h (25 mph), or even 48 km/h (30 mph). The hippo can maintain these higher estimates for only a few hundred yards.

The formidable hippopotamus

The eyes, ears, and nostrils of the hippo are placed high on the roof of the skull. This allows them to spend most of the day with the majority of their body submerged in the waters of tropical rivers to stay cool and prevent sunburn. For additional protection from the sun, their skin secretes a natural sunscreen substance which is red colored. This secretion is sometimes referred to as "blood sweat," but it is not actually blood, nor sweat. This secretion starts out colorless, turns red-orange within minutes, eventually becoming brown.

There are two distinct pigments that have been identified in the secretions, red and orange. The two pigments are highly acidic compounds. They are known as red pigment hipposudoric acid and orange one norhipposudoric acid. The red pigment was found to inhibit the growth of disease-causing bacteria, lending credence to the theory that the secretion has an antibiotic effect. The light absorption of both pigments peaks in the ultraviolet range, creating a sunscreen effect. Hippos all over the world secrete the pigments so it doesn't appear that food is the source of the pigments. Instead, the animals may synthesize the pigments from precursors such as the amino acid tyrosine. (Saikawa, et al., 2004)

As indicated by the name, ancient Greeks considered the hippopotamus to be related to the horse. Until 1985, naturalists grouped hippos with pigs, based on molar patterns. However evidence, first from blood proteins, then from molecular systematics, and more recently from the fossil record, show that their closest living relatives are cetaceans – whales, porpoises and the like [1]. This is somewhat misleading,however, as both cetaceans and hippopotami are early offshoots of artiodactyl evolution, and despite being each other's closest living relatives, the whale and hippo lineages split very soon after they separated from the rest of the artiodactyls.

Range

Before the last Ice Age, the hippo was wide-spread in North Africa and Europe[2], and it can live in colder climates on the condition that the water does not freeze during winter. It is now extinct in Egypt, where it was a familiar animal of the Nile into historic times. Pliny the Elder writes, that in his time, the best location in Egypt for capturing this animal was in the Saite nome (N.H. 28.121); and the animal could still be found along the Damietta branch after the Arab Conquest (639). Even on the island of Malta, at Għar Dalam (the Cave of Darkness), bone remains of hippopotamuses have been found, dated to about 180,000 years old. Hippos are still found in the rivers of Uganda, Sudan, northern Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ethiopia, west to Gambia as well as in Southern Africa (Botswana, Republic of South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia). A separate population is in Tanzania and Mozambique.

The less familiar pygmy hippopotamus of West Africa, Hexaprotodon (Choeropsis) liberiensis, exists in two populations. One ranges in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire. The other population, with a different shape to the skull, ranged until recently in the Niger Delta but may now be extinct.

Lifestyle

Hippos are highly territorial; a male hippo often marks his territory along a riverbank from which to draw in a harem of females, while defending it against other males. Male hippos challenge one another with threatening gapes. Its canine teeth are 50 cm (20 inches) long, and it uses its head as a battering ram, especially against rival males fighting over territory. Since their habitat is often encroached upon by farmers and tourists, and because they are so territorial, the hippopotamus is one of the most dangerous animals in Africa. They are said to account for more human deaths than any other African mammal. The hippo does not hunt humans, but defends its own territory vigorously.

A submerged Hippopotamus

Hippos are usually found in shallow water, and rarely come out of that depth. Most hippos that look as though they are floating are in fact standing or lying on the bottom. They feed on land mostly at night, consuming as much as 50 kg (110 lb) of vegetation per day. They have been known to occasionally scavenge meat from animals found near their range, but hippos are not carnivorous in any realistic sense.

Adult hippos are not generally buoyant. When in deep water, they usually propel themselves by leaps, pushing off from the bottom. They have been observed to move at 8km/h in water. Young hippos are bouyant and more often move by swimming, propelling themselves with kicks of their back legs. One hippo calf survived after being pushed out to sea during the tsunami generated by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and was rescued on a nearby island. [3]

Baby hippos are born underwater at a weight between 60 to 110 pounds and must swim to the surface in order to take their first breath. The young often rest on their mothers' backs when in water that is too deep for them, and swim underwater in order to suckle.

Adult hippos typically resurface to breathe every 3-5 minutes. The young have to breathe every 2-3 minutes. The process of surfacing and breathing is automatic, and even a hippo sleeping underwater will rise and breathe without waking. Some have been documented as staying submerged for 25 minutes. A hippo closes its nostrils when it submerges.

Extinction

A hippo's skull showing the large canine teeth used for fighting.

Three species of hippos became extinct within the Holocene on Madagascar, one of them as recently as about a thousand years ago. A dwarf species, Phanourios minutis, existed on the island of Cyprus but became extinct at the end of the Pleistocene. Whether this was caused by human intervention is debated (see Aetokremnos).

In 2005, the population of hippos in Democratic Republic of the Congo's Virunga National Park had dropped to 800 to 900 individuals from around 29,000 in the mid 1970s, raising concerns about the viability of that population. This decline is attributed to the disruptions caused by the Second Congo War. The poachers are a believed to be former Hutu rebels, poorly paid Congolese soldiers and local militia groups. The poachers hunt due to hunger but also for money. A three-tonne hippo is worth thousands of dollars. The sale of hippo meat is illegal, however, when the meat arrives unannounced in markets, it sells so fast that it is difficult for the WWF officers to track. Conservationists warn that the hippo may soon be extinct in Congo.

References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Hippopotamus.
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