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Welcome to the Okavango River, the largest in-land delta in the world, where hippo pods thrive.Subscribe: http://bit.ly/BBCEarthSub #NaturalWorld #BBCEarthWa...
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Palaeobiologists have unearthed the earliest evidence yet of hippos in the UK. Excavations at Westbury Cave in Somerset, led by University of Leicester PhD student Neil Adams, uncovered a million-year-old hippo tooth which shows the animal roamed Britain much earlier than previously thought.
Oct 4, 2021 · In a new study published in the Journal of Quaternary Science and co-authored with researchers from Royal Holloway, University of London, the tooth is identified as belonging to an extinct species...
Oct 5, 2021 · The study, published in the Journal of Quaternary Science and co-authored with researchers from Royal Holloway, University of London, said the tooth was identified as belonging to an extinct...
- Overview
- A rift in the valley
- Gone fishing
- Hungry hippos
- Cull the hippos?
- “At times I don’t feel like myself”
Floods and the economic fallout from COVID-19 are pitting hungry fishermen against hungry hippos—with deadly results.
NAIVASHA, KenyaIn May, George Mwaura went fishing with his close friend Babu along the swampy shores of Lake Naivasha, in central Kenya. “Babu was a quiet guy, a nice guy,” Mwaura recalled. “He’s the one who taught me patience. And he was quite good at fishing.”
They couldn’t afford a boat, so they’d wade into the water up to their chests to see what fish—tilapia, carp, catfish—had swum into their nets overnight. “We had a lucky catch that day,” Mwaura said. “But before we got the full catch, the hippo came again.”
They’d seen it that morning, its ears and eyes poking above the surface. “We beat the water with a stick to make noise, so the hippo went away,” he said.
The friends were too focused on their fish to notice when it returned. “Babu always told me hippos are dangerous animals,” Mwaura said. Hippos had attacked Babu four times, but he had always managed to escape. “But the fifth one—he did not make it.”
The hippo lunged first at Mwaura, who was able to dart away because he knew how to swim. Then it lunged for Babu, who couldn’t swim. The hippo’s enormous jaw clamped down on him. Its lower two teeth pierced his back—once, twice, a third time. Dozens of fishermen raced to the water’s edge, but when a hippo takes a human, there’s nothing anyone can do.
Lake Naivasha is what scientists call an “amplifier lake” because it shrinks and swells quickly, along with the rains. “When there’s a change in the climate, they will show that—changes in lake level, salinity,” said Lydia Olaka, a professor of environmental geology and climate science at the University of Nairobi.
Covering some 70 square miles during normal times, Lake Naivasha’s surface is more than three times the size of Manhattan, but a mere 60 feet deep at most. It’s fed by three rivers as well as runoff from the surrounding land. The lake has no outlet. Each year, about six feet of water evaporates from its surface into the sunny sky. A decade ago, after a series of droughts, residents feared the lake might disappear, taking an entire ecosystem and the tourism industry down with it.
But in late 2019, Lake Naivasha’s basin received three times its usual rainfall—the result of a phenomenon thousands of miles east, called the Indian Ocean Dipole. It occurs when the surface waters of the ocean beyond Africa’s east coast turn unusually warm, as waters near Asia turn cool. (Read more: The Indian Ocean Dipole also contributed to the plague of locusts in East Africa in 2020.)
The 2020 rainy seasons were also wetter than usual. More rainfall brought increased cloud cover, reducing evaporation from the lake. Part of the lake’s rise also is manmade—the result of decades of deforestation in the lake’s basin, which has increased the amount of runoff that reaches the lake. Naivasha is not alone. A four-hour drive north of Naivasha in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, Lake Bogoria and Lake Baringo have flooded, displacing thousands of people and countless wildlife.
The disappearance of dry land for the hippos to graze upon is due not only to Lake Naivasha’s rising waters, which have climbed 12 vertical feet, but also to illegal human encroachment on the protected riparian boundary. People built houses, tourist cabins, and even greenhouses on this land, but now many of these structures are underwater. The lakeside town of Kihoto, for example, drowned last year. Today, walls of concrete blocks jut up above the dark waters. Several miles west, the curved tops of flooded greenhouses mark where flower farms have been swallowed.
If the lake keeps growing, more buildings will submerge. Yet recently, Kenya’s Water Resources Authority considered allowing people to settle even closer.
Naivasha’s commercial fishing industry began by accident, decades ago, when a torrent of rain flooded a fish farm upstream on the Malewa River. A trove of common carp escaped into the lake, where they ate up most the crayfish and ravished the eggs of the tilapia, black bass, and other species prized by sport fishers.
The carp multiplied, and fishing became a livelihood. When Lake Naivasha suddenly expanded in 2019, it seemed at first like a boon to the fishing industry. Fish bred in the rich, untouched soil of newly inundated riparian land. They grew into thousands of pounds of fresh food—more fish than anyone can remember.
“All of the activities—tourism, pastoralists, floriculture—they all depend on Lake Naivasha,” said David Kilo, chairman of the Naivasha Boat Owners Association. Before COVID-19 arrived, there were 180 licensed fishing boats on the lake—already as many as the lake’s ecosystem could sustainably handle. Now, on the southwestern shore, Karagita boat landing is overrun each morning with fishermen unloading their catches.
In town, women weave long strands of string into fishing nets, which they sell for 1,000 shillings ($9). 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. “They’re sleeping now,” he said. Pointing to a hippo whose head and back broke the water’s surface, he said, “This one’s the baby.” It was the size of a full-grown cow. (Watch: Is this hippo in Botswana grieving the loss of her baby?)
The hippos nestle their giant heads against each other’s backs. 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. It’s impossible to tell where one hippo ends and the next begins. Mokano revs the motor, trying to agitate them so they’ll lift their magnificent heads above the surface. The hippos can’t be bothered.
Scientists estimate that between 29 and 87 percent of hippo attacks are fatal. You’d have a better chance of surviving a shark attack, a crocodile encounter—and magnitudes better odds at surviving a grizzly bear attack. Though hippos are herbivores, when grass is hard to come by, on rare occasions 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. “My vehicle, it looks like an ambulance,” Kilo said. “If people see my vehicle reversing, they say—there’s a hippo attack!”
But Kilo is no EMT. He doesn’t know how to apply tourniquets or pack wounds, interventions that are crucial for saving a victim’s life, according to George Wabomba, a doctor at Naivasha County Referral Hospital. Wabomba treats an average of one or two hippo victims each week. “When you mention there’s a hippo victim, everyone is anxious in the hospital,” he said. “You never know what you’re going to get.”
Hippos can trample victims or drag them. “Sometimes it’s just a bite, and the hippo lets go. But you also get lots of abdominal injuries,” Wabomba said, adding that lacerations may be filled with soil and grass. “We don’t know what’s in a hippo’s mouth, what’s in the water.”
Such injuries require immediate attention, Wabomba said, but often victims don’t arrive for hours. Fishermen have to wait until it’s safe to retrieve the victim—when the hippo moves away—then transport the injured man to the hospital. The closest hospital is only five miles from Karagita, but it’s 24 miles along rough roads from the far side of the lake. (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. He recalled a 35-year-old fisherman he treated last year who was attacked before sunrise as he was placing his nets but didn’t get to the hospital until noon. “Some of his bowels were sticking out,” Wabomba said. “We repaired what could be repaired. This is what we call damage-control surgery.”
The only solution to Naivasha’s standoff is “to work things around hippo behavior,” said Richard Hartley, who manages two conservation areas around the lake. 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. “He’s a maturing male who’s looking for females, and the old bulls don’t want him around,” Hartley said.
Signs reading “Danger” warn tourists not to go out walking at night. But jump in a Land Cruiser, turn on your brights, and you’re sure to spot the silhouettes of hippos grazing in the grasslands. 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.
Since the lake’s rise, partially submerged trees topple daily with a splash as their roots are dislodged. 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.
“You have fishermen who quite honestly don’t seem to feel any fear whatsoever. They will park themselves literally feet away—and they get it wrong,” Hartley said. “There’s a mama with a calf, or there is an aggressive male hippo that’s going to go for you or your boat. And you don’t see them coming because they’re submerged—and they come fast.”
When a particular hippo is believed to have attacked multiple times, fishermen sometimes ask rangers to kill it. “There’s so much community pressure for that animal to be destroyed. And yet it’s almost never the hippo’s fault,” Hartley said. He said one ranger tasked with the job sometimes shoots to miss on purpose, saving the hippo’s life. As more and more fishermen take to the lake, some have called for the hippos to be culled, to decrease their numbers.
Naivasha’s last thorough hippo census was conducted in the 1990s. It estimated that there were 1,250 hippos. Last year, according to Kilo, the Kenya Wildlife Service estimated the number was closer to 700. Hippos are notoriously difficult to count, spending their days underwater in pods, often with only their eyes and ears above the water. Kilo and Hartley say that, while there is some poaching, there’s no reason to believe the hippo population has decreased that drastically. (Learn more: Poaching for hippo teeth has led to declines in Uganda and Tanzania.)
Standing by the lake, Meshack Ogjah limped toward the swampy shore. He pointed to a small area of open water, surrounded by water hyacinth and fallen trees. He said that one evening at dusk he was working in the dark water when a hippo brushed his left side.
He knew the dangers of fishing in a hippo-infested lake. “There was a friend of ours who was attacked—and he didn’t know how to swim,” Ogjah said. The hippo bit him at least twice. He did not survive. Still, Ogjah kept fishing. “It’s only when you feel it yourself that you understand,” he said.
Ogjah was diving into murky water to place a fish trap made of plastic netting when the hippo grazed him. “It started touching me, its belly to my thigh,” he recalled. “I moved to the surface so I could see its movement. Then I started to swim—but it chased me.”
He screamed for help, but there was nothing other fishermen could do. He dived down, hoping the hippo wouldn’t see him. When he reached the shallows, “it saw me well,” said Ogjah—and took a bite.
The hippo’s teeth were “six inches long—and thick,” he said. They pierced his right thigh, and his blood colored the water. “I was feeling like my heart wasn’t there.”
Ogjah managed to escape. Another fisherman hoisted him onto a motorcycle and drove him to the hospital. Doctors cleaned the wound and sewed it shut. Ogjah was lucky to survive. Even so, he says a part of him is missing. “At times I don’t feel like myself. It’s torture,” said Ogjah, who now struggles to walk. “I still have a long way to go.”
Oct 9, 2021 · A newly discovered hippo tooth reveals prehistoric hippopotamuses roamed Britain as early as 1.5 million years ago, far earlier than we thought, giving us new insights into the land's ancient climate.
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Oct 4, 2021 · The discovery of a million-year-old tooth is the earliest evidence to date of giant hippos in the UK. In a new study, scientists have matched the tooth to an extinct species of hippo called Hippopotamus antiquus.
