Most of us probably take multiple small steps everyday which appear to us to be pretty harmless (eg. leaving the tap running whilst we are shaving) but which collectively destabilise the environment. This remarkable long read in The Guardian is about a single act of negligence which has served to destabilise the ecology of Colombia. As Joshua Hammer explains that single act of negligence involved a few hippos: “In Africa, hippos are thought to kill about 500 people a year, making them among the most dangerous animals to humans…”
The hippos in question found themselves in Colombia, rather than in Africa, thanks to an infamous benefactor: “Their increasingly ubiquitous presence here is an unlikely legacy of Pablo Escobar, the infamous drug baron from Medellín. Decades ago, Escobar spent part of his vast fortune assembling a menagerie of exotic animals, including elephants, giraffes, zebras, ostriches and kangaroos, at his hacienda outside Doradal, a town about 10 miles west of the Magdalena. After he was shot dead in Medellín by Colombian police in 1993, local people poured on to the property and tore apart Escobar’s villa in search of rumoured caches of money and weapons. Afterward, the hacienda sank into ruin. In 1998, the government seized the property and eventually transferred most of the animals to domestic zoos. But several hippos – most sources say three females and one male – were considered too dangerous to move. And that’s how Colombia’s current trouble began.”
The one lucky male hippo with his harem combined to spectacular effect to create a hippo population explosion in the tropical forests of Colombia: “The hippos multiplied. (Once they reach maturity, female hippos can produce a calf every 18 months, and they can give birth 25 times during a lifespan of 40 to 50 years.) Males cast out of the herd by the dominant male migrated elsewhere, started their own herds and took over new territory. Today nobody knows how many hippos inhabit the rivers and lakes of the Magdalena Basin, which covers roughly 260,000 sq km and is home to two-thirds of Colombia’s human population. As of late 2023, the official government count was 169. David Echeverri López, chief of the Biodiversity Management Office of Cornare, a regional environmental agency, says there could be 200. Colombian biologists recently predicted that by 2040, if nothing is done to control their breeding, the population will grow to as many as 1,400. The hippos will use the Magdalena River as their primary expansion route, says Francisco Sánchez, an environmental official in the riverside municipality of Puerto Triunfo, which includes Doradal. “They’ll get all the way to the sea, because they will just follow the river.” He calls the situation “completely out of control”.”
Leaving aside the threat the hippos pose to human life in Colombia, there is another even more serious issue that needs to be dealt with: “Colombian scientists are sounding alarms about the impact on the region’s ecosystem. For example, a single hippo produces up to 9kg of faeces a day. In Africa, the dung long provided nutrients for fish populations in rivers and lakes, but in recent years, perhaps as a consequence of warming temperatures, water-intensive agriculture and increasing drought, the dung has accumulated to toxic levels in stagnating pools, killing off the same aquatic life that once benefited from it. Experts fear the same thing could happen in Colombia. And competition for food and space could displace otters, West Indian manatees, capybaras and turtles. “If I lived in Colombia, I would be worried,” Rebecca Lewison, an ecologist at San Diego State University’s Coastal and Marine Institute, told me. “Colombia has great biodiversity, and this is not a system that has evolved to support a mega-herbivore.””
So what can be done now? Had this problem cropped up in America, the Americans would have asked the Fed to cut interest rates but in Colombia that might not work. Mr Hammer informs that the Colombians are taking a proactive approach now to tackle the hippo menace: “The population in this lake, where the animals spend the daylight hours, had reached about 50 – the densest concentration outside the park, and became the initial target of the new surgical castration campaign. Echeverri López pointed to a corral a few dozen yards from the lake, one of three strategically placed enclosures built using a metal alloy that is all but unbreakable, even by huge, angry mammals. The team uses a trail of carrots, cabbages and fruit to lure hippos into the enclosure; a spring-trap door then slams shut. Once lured, the animals are shot with tranquilliser darts, allowing the scientists to castrate them where they rest. Cornare observers conduct spot checks every evening, and if they encounter a trapped hippo, they quickly summon the surgical team to the scene.”
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