Why hippos attack

Hippopotamuses by defecation. They do this by spinning their tails to distribute their poop as far as possible. Hippos are only territorial in water, and a dominant bull controls a stretch of around meters - with about 10 females.

Staying in water helps hippopotamuses stay cool from the strong African sun. A hippo's skin is hairless, which means the sun and bugs are a serious problem to deal with. Hippos sleep in the water by fully submerging their bodies.

They automatically rise up to the surface and breathe without waking up. Otherwise, they would have had to wake up ever 5 minutes to breath, and then go back to sleep for another 5 minutes. Hippos are herbivores that will graze on grass. Their main diet is short grass and some very few fruits species.

Their digestive systems resemble those of other herbivores - with a few their own adaptions. Read our updated article about what hippos eat for more insight into the food and eating habits of hippos. Hippos do not eat meat. The stomach structures of herbivores such as hippos and elephants cannot digest meat. Hippos do not eat any sort of fish or insects either.

While there are some cases that have been noted and studied, the reason for why a hippo would eat meat is unknown. Our article about what hippos eat highlight more on this. A single hippo can eat about 40 kilograms of food. Hippos graze for about 5 hours in the night and cover a territory of up to 8 kilometres. A young one of a hippo is called a calf.

Same as the young one of an elephant or a cow. A male hippo is called a bull, and the female hippo called a cow. Cows and hippos can be called by the same names for male, female and young ones. Hippos give birth underwater because it is safest there. This is of course in shallow waters. After birth, the cow and calf hippos stay in water full time for up to 14 days, without going out to graze.

A hippo secretes some natural chemicals to protect its bare skin from the tropical sun. These two secretions are of hipposudoric acid and norhipposurdic acid. Combined, these two chemicals are what is commonly referred to as blood sweat. Besides absorbing ultraviolet light from the sun, they also inhibit bacteria - thus preventing diseases. A hippopotamus can live for 40 - 50 years. To put this in context, this is more than 4 times the average lifespan of a lion. A hippopotamus moves in water by using its feet to propel itself forward.

A hippo's body is well adapted to move in water with ease. The facial features such as the eyes and nostrils are placed on the top of the head to allow for total immersion except for the eyes and nostrils.

While Hippos spend an average of 15 hours a day in the water, they do not breathe when underwater. They also enjoy eating human crops. Looking for hippo signs — like poop and footprints — is a good start. Hippos can remain underwater for 6 minutes or more. If you are swimming in the water or on a small boat and see a hippo surface far from you, slap the water continuously with an object like a paddle. This will alert the hippos to your presence and decrease the likelihood they might accidentally surface next to you.

Shallow water is a bad place to be. So in this case, deeper water would be safer. Avoid mating season. The most dangerous thing you can do is to navigate down a waterway that is choked with numerous hippos — especially waterbodies in the dry season.

Give them space. They grew into thousands of pounds of fresh food—more fish than anyone can remember. Now, on the southwestern shore, Karagita boat landing is overrun each morning with fishermen unloading their catches.

Teenage boys are paid pennies to repair old nets that have been tangled or cut by a propeller. And each day, tourists arrive at the landing and hire boat captains to take them on hippo tours. Early one morning, a captain named Douglas Mokano puttered toward a pod of hippos. Watch: Is this hippo in Botswana grieving the loss of her baby? Despite their girth, they manage to squeeze together so tightly that a pod of five hippos looks like a single blob of grey and pink flesh.

Kenya Wildlife Service has been unable or unwilling to put a stop to the illegal fishing. The agency did not respond to repeated requests for comment. One night when they tried to arrest a group of fishermen, the fishermen fought back.

They tied up the rangers, overturned their boat, and set it on fire, stranding the rangers until they could be rescued. Scientists estimate that between 29 and 87 percent of hippo attacks are fatal. Though hippos are herbivores, when grass is hard to come by, on rare occasion s they have been known to eat other animals— even deceased hippos. Kilo has witnessed or investigated eight attacks in which fishermen died. Attacks have become so common that he has transformed his car into a makeshift rescue vehicle, removing the back seats so victims can be loaded easily and laying down plastic to catch the blood.

But Kilo is no EMT. Wabomba treats an average of one or two hippo victims each week. Hippos can trample victims or drag them. Related: Delayed treatment and antivenom shortages put tens of thousands in Africa at risk of dying from snakebites. Wabomba estimates that 40 percent of the hippo victims he sees ultimately die.

This is what we call damage-control surgery. Driving his Land Cruiser across one of them on a recent afternoon, he stopped to watch a lone hippo resting in a shallow pool of mud. Sometimes they stare at you, caught in the headlights. But usually they trot away, showing you only their pink behinds as their tiny tails wag frantically. Fishermen have taken to casting lines from these trunks, their legs dangling just feet above the heads of hippos.

Periodically the hippos grunt, reminding the fishermen that danger is only a slip away. When a particular hippo is believed to have attacked multiple times, fishermen sometimes ask rangers to kill it. As more and more fishermen take to the lake, some have called for the hippos to be culled, to decrease their numbers.

It estimated that there were 1, hippos. Last year, according to Kilo, the Kenya Wildlife Service estimated the number was closer to Hippos are notoriously difficult to count, spending their days underwater in pods, often with only their eyes and ears above the water.

Learn more: Poaching for hippo teeth has led to declines in Uganda and Tanzania. Culling is sometimes considered when a habitat can no longer support the number of animals living on it—when the population exceeds the supply of grass needed to feed them, said Hartley.

If the lake continues to swallow more grassland, he says wildlife rangers might consider culling the hippos rather than let dozens starve to death. That would be an international embarrassment for Kenya, a nation known for its wildlife, Hartley says. Although hippos were long believed to be exclusively herbivorous, study published in the journal Mammal Review found that hippos occasionally feed on the carcasses of animals, including other hippos.

Female hippos have a gestation period of eight months and have only one baby at a time, according to the San Diego Zoo. At birth, the calf weighs between 50 and lbs. For its first eight months, the calf nurses while its mother is on land, or it swims underwater to suckle.

When it dives, the calf closes its nose and ears to block out water. All hippos have this ability. Hippos also have membranes that cover and protect their eyes while they are underwater.

At 5 to 7 years old, the hippo calf is fully mature, according to the San Diego Zoo. The median life expectancy of a hippo is 36 years. The hippopotamus is considered the world's deadliest large land mammal. These semiaquatic giants kill an estimated people per year in Africa, according to the BBC.

Hippos are highly aggressive and are well-equipped to deliver considerable damage to anything that wanders into their territory. For example, in , a hippo attacked a small, unsuspecting boat filled with Nigerian school children, killing twelve students and one teacher on board, an Australian news outlet reported.