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Oh hey, it's the fish soup that you spilled all over the kitchen, which actually did happen to me, Halle Ward. And this is Ologies. It's a podcast where we explore an ology a week. So you are tuning into a chat about hippos? It will leave you changed. It changed me. We got a true hippopotamologist, a professor of biology at San Diego State uh University, whose research at Vassar and UC Davis focused on vulnerable wildlife populations and conservation and of course
Hippos. So they know way more about hippos than most people ever will on the planet. And they are in a very elite club of hippopotamologists. And I asked her all of my very not smart questions as well as yours. If you want to submit a question ahead of time before we record. You can become a patron at patreon.com slash ologies. It costs about 25 cents an episode to join. It helps fund the show. You can also buy OlogiesMerch at ologiesmerch.com or you can support for no dollars.
By leaving us a review, which helps convince me that I'm not broadcasting to an assortment of dolls in a basement. And I read all your reviews. Such as this one from Chris F, who writes, Even if I were a many legged insect, I still wouldn't have enough appendages to count all the times I've thrown a did you know this bizarre and uniquely entertaining fact about X, Y, or Z at an unsuspecting friend since I started listening to this podcast?
Three cheers to you, weird podcast dad. Chris F and all my stuffed animals listening out there. Thank you for letting me father you. Okay. Hippos, hippos. You might know, you probably know that hippopotamus in Latin, it means river horse. If you didn't know that, I'm gonna give you a second. It's hippo means horse. Potamus means of the river. Hippopotamus. River horse, these beasts.
They are artidactyls, meaning that they have an even number of toes, like a bison or a deer and a giraffe, those are all in artidactyls. And after elephants and rhinos, hippos are the largest land mammal, even though the common hippo's scientific name is hippopotamus amphibius.
Terrestrial animal? We'll get into it. So point your weird little ears our way to learn about knife teeth, blood sweat, swamp hippos, pet hippos, subspecies, their daily diet, the current state of hippo conservation, the absolute chaotic affection we have for mudang. How many people hippos kill a year for real? If you need to apologize to a hippo, who are hippo's best friends, their role as ecosystem engineers.
If you have ever been brainwashed about a hippo, what's up with their nostrils? How to keep a hippo in your pocket, and tips on flattering your friends into planning a group vacation with conservation biologist, professor, and actual real-life hippopotamologist, Dr. Rebecca Luke. I'm Rebecca Lewison. I'm she her. Thank you so much for doing this. As someone who studies hippos. This is a busy time of life for you. And we will get to why. How long have hippos been part of your bread and butter?
I started studying hippos as a graduate student. I was at UC Davis doing my PhD in ecology, and I kind of stumbled into this project. to work on hippos. My interest was to study behavioral ecology. At the time I just really loved, it was fascinated by sort of the minutiae of animal behavior and
I thought, oh, this will be perfect. I'll study hippos, which anyone who actually studies behavior will be laughing when they hear this, because you think like, no, no, no, no. You study behavior on small things like birds or squirrels, not hippos. Not her, she dedicated her research to a notoriously challenging terrestrial species. What the hell happened? But I I had this opportunity because I had spent time in Kenya.
as an undergrad and so could speak some Swahili and had traveled around and just had a fair amount of field experience. And so I got this amazing opportunity. and kind of just fell into it and didn't realize what I was getting into at the time and sort of entering this amazing world of this understudied animal. So it might be easier to see the behavior of like spiders if they're living in the lab and stuff.
Exactly. You can't study it in the lab. You can't manipulate it at all. They're actually really hard to study, period, because they spend almost all their time in the water. Like you couldn't pick Something less studyable if you tried. You know, pop culturally there's no lack of hippos. Who didn't play Hungry Hungry Hippo as a kid? The most marbles wins! I played it all the time. They don't even eat marbles in real life, right? They definitely don't.
What are they eating? Are they eating mostly plants? They are eating mostly plants, so they are herbivores. They eat grass, so we can be a little more specific than that. They're basically like lawnmowers. They eat a tremendous amount of grass, and it has to be pretty short. Why? Well because it's just wait till we unpack this. Like hippos are amazing head to tail.
They don't really have a neck. They don't really have any um structures in the back of that part of their spine. So they can't really lift their heads up like when you think of like giraffes or elephants. They can't do that. So they're really limited by the grass. No neck. Hippos are necklace. And so are they foraging the grasses on the banks of rivers or are they coming up on land?
Yes, that's a great question. And it's a little bit of a yes. They do forage on the banks, but what you'll see if you're in a place where there are a lot of hippos is you really know a lot about where hippos are going because they have these trails. And you can look down on the trail and see like a hippo print, another hippo print. So they just follow these trails for a really long time. So they're really well established to what we call grazing land.
So areas of short grass that are some distance away from usually the water where they're in. So they have stomped down a little highway that leads to a food court of short grass. It's like a free buffet, but it only serves short grass. If hippos are like the size of a car, or a small car, and they're eating just a very particular kind of grass down a long trail, how are they getting enough calories to have so much cake, to have w such a dump charge?
Yeah, it's crazy. We think they eat somewhere between f like maybe fifty to a hundred pounds. We don't a hundred percent know'cause it's hard to tell and obviously in captivity their diet is much better. They eat you'll see them like eating watermelon or pumpkins, you know, if you've seen the videos. So they're not necessarily super particular on the species of grass, just the height of the grass. So I think these grazing lawns
are there because of them and they continue to get mowed down by hippos. And they're pretty long lived. So I'm sure they have a lot of information that they store. Mm. And if you want to study, like if you were a graduate student and you were captivated by foraging behavior, that's what you do. You'd follow the paths, you'd sit in a a vehicle and you'd get some crude night scope and you'd watch them for hours and hours and hours. And that's basically what I did. ¿Están nocturnal?
Yes. What? They only come out of the water at night. What? And we think that's because of thermoregulation, right? They're adapted to be in the water. They don't do well if there isn't standing water and they'll die without that. So in the dry sea. And so for m most of the year they are only coming out of the water.
you know, when it's dusk and getting dark. So yeah, what I would do is sit I would drive my land rover to the place where that foraging lawn was and then I would sit on the roof with a pretty old school night scope and watch them forage. That was that's what I did for about a year. When would you sleep? Would you sleep during the day? I have some crazy stories of falling asleep and like waking up to elephants at night.
level because I would fall asleep. Like you said, I wasn't getting enough sleep. But yes, I would sleep during the day and try to stay up. And I would have to do it when there was some full moon because it was really crude. It was, you know, mid nineties. So we had night scopes, but nothing like we do now. What happens if you're asleep on top of a Land Rover watching hippos and a elephant wakes you up?
Good question. The incredible thing is what I remember doing is picking my head up and I'm literally at eye level because I was on the top of this pickup truck. And I literally just picked my head up. I saw an elephant and I was so tired I just put my head down and went back to sleep. Yeah. Did you think you were dreaming for one second? I think I woke up in the morning and I definitely was like
What? But you know, for people who work in the field and yeah, obviously I was careful and, you know, followed all the protocols I was supposed to follow, but amazing things happen. Just a normal day on the job for a hippo ecologist. So you're
absolutely in a safari park of life or you're surrounded by something that is sounds like a fever dream. What are you doing when you're watching them at night? Are you taking notes like this one went in did a poop on this one or this one seems to be crying. I know. It's so I'm gonna say it out loud and then people are gonna go.
Scientists do what? But I was actually counting the number of bites and steps. I know. I say it out loud and I just think, what? And it does sound like minutia to me too, but it's fascinating. Like we know what we do. What do hippos do? How far do they go? Can they just go anywhere? Like you were asking those questions initially. So I spent all this time trying to understand sort of their their strategy. How do they make it work? How do they get enough?
How do they decide where to go? And how do you make choices about where to fork? And so when we see hippos in zoos, they are opening their gaping maws and a whole pumpkin goes in. But do they have that kind of experience ever in the wild? They don't. I hippos in captivity, you know, all the accredited places that hippos are living takes amazing care of the animals. They give them lettuce and
pumpkins and watermelon and amazing things and very, very well fed. But no, nothing like that happens to him. How long do they live? You said they live a long time? Yeah, we think they live around thirty to forty years in the wild. And in captivity they can live quite a bit longer. And o okay. They're horses of the river, right? Like water horses. Yes. How are they extracting calories from a bunch of grass? Do they have stomachs like hippos? I mean stomachs like Like courses.
Hippos. You're never gonna believe this. Hippos have stomachs like hippos. Oh Okay, so remember I said they are incredible head to toe. So they have incredible stomachs. So anyone who's like fascinated by stomachs, there's not gonna be a very large slice of listeners, but you out there. They have all this interesting
Stomach structures that actually is similar to what cows have. They are not ruminants, but they do have this like blind sack. They have like this three-chambered stomach, but they do something similar to ruminants. So they don't have like cud, but they keep things in their stomach a really long time. And I think that gets to your question, like way more than elephants are like conveyor.
It goes in and it goes out. And if you see an elephant poop, I don't know who has, but you'll notice like, oh, I know what that is. It looks just like what they just took in. But for hippos, not so. So it really breaks down a lot. So that this three chambered stomach.
has this ability to extract resources. So even though fifty to a hundred pounds sounds a lot for wild hippos, you like you said, they're size of a VW bus. And so They're using this three-chambered stomach structure to extract all the nutrients and keep things in their stomach kind of a long time. So if you're a hippo doing your thing, it's say a Thursday and you're eating an average of 75 pounds of mowed grass, which is about two huge garbage bags full of lawn clippings per day.
So much salad. Your favorite dressing I guess is mud. There's no croutons. Maybe you got some accidental worms in there, but you're eating dirt grass. It's the breakfast of champions. It's the dinner of champions. How many pounds are we talking of hippo? So they're about like twenty five hundred to three thousand pounds in the water. In the wild. And then pygmy hippos, by contrast. Pygmy hippos by contrast are about four hundred to four fifty.
So there were only two species of hippopotamuses, or hippopotami. Either word is legit and fine. I thought there were maybe ten species of hippopotamus, but there are two. The common big ass hippo that you're used to is a hippopotamus amphibius, and then there's the pygmy hippo, Coeropsis liberiensis. You don't need to know those names, but there's just two species. And pygmy hippos are one sixth the size of a regular hippo. common hippo. Really, really quite a bit smaller. Yeah.
That's kind of like a pig, right? A a big pig, absolutely. Wait, how come I didn't know about pygmy hippos until now? This is the reason most people don't. It's because Pygmy hippos are only in West African countries and even within West African countries. They're only in four of them and they're very, very secretive. Whereas the big hippos that you're used to are just like here. They're like, I'm in the river, what's up? So we think of common hippos right there, this iconic
Animal of the African savannah, right? You'll see a picture of like a big hippo gaping with a sunset behind it. Until two thousand and six, we hadn't even ever had a picture of pygmy hippos in the wild. No And it's because they're very rare, right? They're an endangered animal and they've there's used to be a very large forest complex.
in Sierra Leone and uh Liberia and Guinea and Côte d'Ivoire that kind of went over that entire region. It's largely been lost or there's been a lot of habitat loss of that forest. And that's what pygmy hippos rely on. They're also solitary. So they don't do this big group aggregation that we see with common hippos. So it's not surprising. They're secretive and solitary, cryptic forest animals, and there's very, very few.
These little big babies, they live in Northwest Africa in forests. They keep to themselves. They come out at night like Mothman, and they're little. They're like farm hog size. As for how long humans have been like gazing at them from behind a fence,
According to this nineteen seventy two paper, the care and breeding of the pygmy hippopotamus in captivity, the first time they were introduced into captivity was in eighteen seventy three in a Dublin zoo. And I was looking to try to find out more about that. But instead I stumbled upon an article about a Scottish zoo who just a few months ago welcomed the birth of a baby girl, Pygmy Hippo. And then they made the decision to name her Haggis.
In all fairness, she does resemble kind of a grey lump made of skin. But they didn't h they didn't have to go there. But yeah, the people they want the baby pygmy hippos. With little sign that Moodung fever is waning, it seems this bouncy pig is more than earning her keep. Forced out of their land and hunted to near extinction in the wild, but in captivity, absolute slay.
San Diego Zoo, you know, fantastic zoo. When I used to go with my kids and we'd be standing at the Pygmy Hippo, people would say, Oh, these are just baby hippo. Oh, that's gotta be infuriating for you. What did you say? I corrected everybody. Thank you. Whether they wanted it or not. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but they do look, honestly to me, they look very I can understand why people maybe think they're the same thing, only smaller. So for everyone listening, they are absolutely not
Bygmy hippos are a separate species and actually evolutionarily they split from common hippos like millions of years ago. Really? Yeah. Yeah. So it's um convergent evolution? Yeah, and and a lot of the structures that they have are not that similar. But one of the things that I know people sometimes get fascinated about common hippos is that they are most closely related to whales. And cetaceans. No. That's true? No. That is a hundred percent true. No. What?
That's right. Common hippos, the big ones you're used to, they're most closely related to whales. Yes, and we know this from like all lines of evidence. Like it used to just be morphology, morphological evidence and they did looking at fossils and different parts of the animals, but science progressed and we started using genetic information, they've used all sorts of genetic tests to demonstrate that they are in fact uh sister taxa cetaceans and and hippos. So Oh. I have so many questions.
Mouths. I'm thinking of like baleen, huge insane mouths on whales and hippos. Why mouths so big? Why are their mouths so big? That's a good question actually. So and then pygmy hippos don't have the gape. Like common hippos do, right? Common hippos have like a hundred and eighty. They can actually open their jaws that much. Unhinged, you know. And it is a good question why,'cause it's not like they're eating pumpkins and big things in the wild. I will say that
Male hippos, sometimes you'll see male hippos engaged in what looks like we're gonna say like this mortal combat. I don't think it usually rul results in mortality, but they do use their gait. both I think against other hippos, you know, if they're having a territorial fight and other animals. They're Pretty badass. How big are their teeth?
So they have different types of teeth. They have sort of molars and then they have canines which come up which can be nine or ten inches. And then they also have incisors. The canines are actually s most similar to elephant tubes. What are they used for? Again, it's probably just some type of defense. That's so much tooth for someone that eats grass. So much tooth, and it's a bummer for them because those canine teeth actually do have eye. Oh. So it's not as high quality as L.
But it's one of the reasons that hippos have gotten wrapped up in the ivory trade or legal ivory trade is because they're canines. So those are the ones that are sort of the curved ones coming out of their bottom jaw have ivory are made of ivory, yeah. These tusks, these mouth harpoons, grow their entire lives and the bottom incisors, they jut straight out for better stabbing. And though females do have smaller teeth than the males, male tusks
can be over twenty inches long or sixty centimeters. Why so big? Because they use them to gore the mouths of their rivals in this spitty, bloody jab battle. It looks like chewing on glass. Now that I know that they are sister taxa to whales. Ja. Swimming. How are they swimming? They got no flippers. What's going on? All right, you ready? They aren't even swimming. No. They can't swim. They they sort of glide, walk, run along the bottom. So they're never in deep water?
They can be in deep water. They can be submerged. You know, they they can stay under for about five to six minutes, but they're not actually swimming. I guess if if you think about like if you were doing aqua robot, I was just gonna say, this is like going to the why. What? Yeah. Don't try this with them, but it is just like And so how are they underwater for five or six minutes? And what occasion do they have to use that feature? Yeah, it's a that's a really good question. What are they doing?
So one thing, remember we talked about them being related to whales, they have nostrils on the top of their So if you look at a hippo, let's see how do I describe this. So essentially your nostrils face your feet, right? Don't put your fingers in there, but you know they're facing your feet. They're pointing down. Hippo nostrils are like on the top of their head and they're facing the sky. Like you know Shrek's ears.
that's like their nostrils. But they also have ears that look like Shrek's ears. So they kind of have like a Shrek's ears for ears and then a small Shrek's ears that are actually their nostrils. It's just unsettling. I like it. And they actually have muscular and anatomical features that are similar to blow holes. Oh. So the nostrils close when they go underwater. And when they come up, one of the ways you know that there's a hippo there is'cause you hear the
Right when they blow out. And so that's similar to what we see with cetaceans, right? When they come up and they're they're blowholes. So there's actually some characteristics of of their nostrils that are similar to that. What do they do underwater? It's hard to know because we really it's very hard to see. Jacques Cousteau famously like put this fake hippo and people have tried this, like deploy like a autonomous, you know, vehicle in the water dressed up as a hippo.
Bernard touches a fleeing hippo. And then cannot resist petting her baby. It was not a very good idea. It doesn't go very well. For the The hippos. thing out of here. So it's pretty hard to to see what they're doing. And mostly they're in water that is not clear. You can't see anything. I was gonna say it's like a chocolate river. That's right. Um hip ups killing people. Let's talk about it because they uh cause more human fatalities than sharks.
W we as if we don't have it coming. Like we have it coming so hard. But how are they lethal? I do wanna say as I because I think I have to represent for the hippos on this one, that more hippos die as a result of hippo human conflict than humans. For sure. Which is not to underestimate the devastation that happens when there's a fatality, but
I don't think kippos are naturally aggressive to people. The biggest threat that they face is habitat loss. They rely on fresh water, we rely on fresh water. We want to put a farm next to a river because that's where it's easy to grow crops, that's where they live. they're obligate, you know, in the water. They have to be there. So it's not like they can just pick up and move. There has been an increase in hippocuman fatalities. And I think it's really just an indication of of habitat.
So what's the source of all this drama? Surprise, it's us. Do those happen with overturned boats or bites, or how does it Yeah, it it definitely happens with people fishing in boats. It happens with tourists in boats. It does sometimes happen on land because hippos are crop raiders. Turns out they love eating, you know, we just said they love pumpkins. If you plant some, they'll come eat them. It's not usually pumpkins, but like corn or beans. They do a lot of crop.
Right, to their defense. You make you put the food right next to where they live. So Yeah. It's like donuts in the breaker room. What are they supposed to do? Yeah, and much higher quality nutritionally than anything else that they're eating. So it makes sense to them. It's a definite problem and it's really tough. to develop deterrents.
You know, people talk about electric fences, but a lot of this is happening in places where there might not be electricity or a lot of infrastructure. And so it's a real challenge to figure out how to get hippos and humans to cope. How are hippo numbers? We know that the pygmy hippo is not doing so great, but how are hippo numbers in general?
Common hippos are in 38 countries, and so it's a challenge to get all that information. But our best guess is probably something around 130,000, which is not a lot. In the world? Yeah. I I mean w well recently we only count the ones in Africa. So aside from Zeus, are there hippos outside of Africa? Oh we will discuss. Yeah, in Africa and that's about probably a third of the amount of elephants that we have. And so it
a real issue and the problem is when I would tell people, Oh, I study hippos, first of all, that's crazy. And we're concerned because their numbers are declining. If you're in a place where there are a lot of hippos, someone's gonna turn around behind you and be like, excuse me, do you see that large group of like fifty to a hundred hippos? But they aggregate.
And so it may seem like there's a lot of them, but there's been a tremendous amount of loss of habitat. And, you know, 130,000 is not very many. Yeah, I would have thought there were millions out there. Yeah. And when it comes to distribution
Thirty eight countries is so many countries. But if you had a map of the world, where do we think they are that they're not? And what would surprise us about where they are? Like when it comes to their range, what do most people think versus what's a reality?
Yeah, I think most people know, like I said, sort of East African countries, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, South Africa. Botswana has a lot of hippos. The place that we know Hippos are probably most vulnerable right now is West African countries because there's much more population growth.
less habitat for hippos, a lot more pressure on freshwater resources. And so I think there's probably people in countries like Nigeria Guinea or Guinea Bissau that may that they may not even know that they have common hippos because they exist in so in such low depth. And Rebecca says that while there are only two species, there is debate about whether up to four subspecies exist since West and East African hippos are so isolated from each other geographically.
And there's some disagreement of whether there are or aren't subspecies, but there are as potentially as many four subspecies. When you say disagreement. What is that like in the hippo community? Are there conferences? Do people not speak to certain colleagues anymore? What's that what are hippo people like? There aren't very many of us. And part of it is because hippos are really hard to study. They're these animals that are hiding in plain sight. They're in the water during the day.
it's very difficult to tell them apart, right? With elephants we have big ears that you can identify individuals and you just can't and they're just not on a lot of radars for conservation organizations, so they haven't gotten a lot of funding. The hippo community is is thin on the ground. Well, you mentioned big ears. Why do they have such shiny ears?
That is a good question. We don't really know, but it could have to do with the fact that most animals that develop in the water, like sea lions, have pretty tiny ears, right? And so I think we don't tend to see animals that have, you know, come up evolutionarily in the water with big ears. I guess there's a reason we don't go swimming in gowns. Exactly. You don't want too much drag. You mentioned the nostrils being like blowholes. Jungle Cruise at Disney. You've been on it?
It you're not far from Anaheim. What I recall from that ride is that there's a lot of puns. I believe there's some racism in it, but also there's a depiction of hippos as like nature's ultimate predator. Do you recall anything about that? I do. It looks like the hippos are gonna attack the boat, but I'm gonna scare them off like I did my last relationship. I don't remember engaging too many people, but I certainly told my whole family and the people I'm
This is not accurate. There's a lot of that. That the one thing people ask me when they find out that I work on hippos is Kind of where we started. Do they really kill more people than any African animal? I don't know who started that, but it certainly wasn't me, and I don't think it's accurate. It is not fact based. I think snakes kill way more people than hippos. I think the reason it started sort of this urban legend is because it's surprising. It's surprising that
For people to know how fast they move on land? And the answer is faster than us. You know, maybe 19, 20 miles an hour they can run. They can move extremely fast in the water. And I think that there ha has been an increase in hippo-human conflict and that takes people by surprise because they're not particularly aggressive, I think, naturally. I think what we're really seeing is
habitat loss. They're under tremendous pressure. And so those the the number of attacks is on the rise. But I just want to tell people now I don't think hippos kill more people than any other African animal. I mean h hello mosquitoes. Yes, exactly. That's who started this whole thing. Субтитры сделал DimaTorzok It was the mosquito lobby. Trying to point the finger at Hippo. It goes like uh we did a mosquito episode recently and it's like mosquitoes, other humans.
Yeah. Snakes, like dogs with rabies, like whatever. Humans and mosquitoes are the ones you gotta watch out for. Can I ask you patron questions? Yeah. Okay. Your questions about hippos in a moment, but first we're gonna fling some cash at a worthy cause and this week it's going to Wei Chow Community Hippo Sanctuary, which is a community led tourism attraction project. It's located at Wei Chow in the Upper West region of Ghana.
And they say that hippos help regulate both aquatic and terrestrial habitats and are great ecosystem engineers. So it's a great cause. To find out more, you can go to wilderinstitute.org. The link is in the show notes. So thank you for the heads up on that, Rebecca, and thanks for the money, sponsors.
Dapå klassiskt, braissimo! Jag heter Karlo och är SBAs sparprofil. Jag tänkte att ta ton för klassiskt spara hos SPAB. Allt ramta och jättetrygt, inga konstigheter. Det är värt att påminna om det så här i skatåberingstid. Sparkontot omfattas av insättningsgaranti. Läs mer och börja spara klassiskt på spav.se. Hallå alla kreativa skälar. Vi på post Nord ser er, och era pasta paket, kompost påsar och fryspitsa kartonger som flödar genom hela Sverige.
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När planerna ändras är ikan nära nära. Här hittar du alltid det som behövs, snabbt enkelt och utan omvägar. Det kallar vi runt hörnet effekten. Välkommen in! Har du en folksvagen som är från 2018? Då är den välkommen hem. Vi ger bilen vad den behöver, och du betalar. Samtidigt får du väg. 다음 영상에서 만나요. Volkswagen Sälla, snälla, slutet. Vi är tråkig! Jag kommer inte köpa ut åt er! Fuck. Det blir i alla fall inte värre så här. Ibland är ett nej, det finaste du kan ge. annorlunda av en anledning.
Okay, your questions. You can submit yours via patreon.com slash ologies. It costs one hot dollar a month. Although the upper tiers let you leave us audio questions. So let's dig into the bag and let's get those answered and find out how to make hippos happier. Deborah Brunner said um Sadly, everything I know about hippos is from the jungle crews at Disneyland. So I was wondering, is it true that hippos are really only dangerous when they're blowing bubbles and wiggling their ears?
I don't think that's true, Deborah. Okay. I think Bubbles and and wiggling is not the thing you have to worry about. I think the real thing you have to worry about people ask me like what what do I do to sort of like fend off an attack? And you know, the answer is like
Wait, why are you in a place where hippos can attack you? The thing we need to do is avoid them and not be in those spaces. Now, if you're a commercial fisherman in an area that has hippos, you know, it's a different situation, but most of us aren't. So yeah, here's an idea. You don't want to see the sharp end of a tusk, stay out of the river. If a hippo picked a lock and arrived in the middle of the night in your living room, dripping with river poo.
Would you not grab the baseball bat between your bed and the nightstand and ask it in no uncertain terms to scram? I know you would. Speaking of certainty, do hippos know when they've found the one? Steph Simmons. Ann Arbor, Michigan, asked. I'm wondering if hippos are monogamous.
Do they mate for life? No. They are not monogamous. They don't mate for life. And in fact, they don't really form bonds like that. So hippos are something called polygynous, which means there's a single male, a dominant male, and lots of females.
that he probably mates with. Hello, ladies. And that herd is like that, sort of with one male and lots of females, until another dominant male comes over and challenges that hippo for that territory. So when you see the No, National Geographic pictures of two hippos with big gapes sort of going at it and with those big teeth we were talking about, like what those are for, those are territory fights or control over one of those polygynous herds. Got it. They're kind of like in a bar fight.
A little bit. Yeah. They're showing off a little too. Exactly. Um, Amanda and Eli loves vultures both wanna know. Eli says, I love hearing scientists describe animal sounds, wheezes and honks and croaks. Oh my. What do we know about the sounds they make and what don't we know? That is a great question. And the answer is we know almost nothing. about hippo communication. Why not? They're communicating in the air, like we are, but they're also communicating in the water.
And we don't really understand how they're doing it. We can record them, and people have done that, and they describe sort of clicks. And other types of noises underwater. And then the noises that they make above ground are often described, maybe this person who asked the question knows, as like wheeze honks.
like that, right? It's not a great one. I'm probably not gonna call them in. But I think it it's these crazy noises and we really don't know anything about what it means, what they're saying, how they're even communicating in the water. I love I so appreciate that you're able to to mimic them like that. Do people ever try to get them to come to them? Uh no one that I know.
I I think it's interesting because honestly it it just feels like one of the wonderful mysteries of hippos, but it's also one of the things that's kept them, I think, off the radar and kept them sort of in this area of We see you, but we don't know anything about you. It is just that they're so tough to study. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Hippopotamologists. We absolutely do.
Uh several listeners asked this question that was absolutely not on my radar whatsoever. Amanda Nugent asks, is there a plan for the cocaine hippos in Columbia from Escobar's Estate? Kayla White all cap. All caps, no punctuation, said please, please, please talk about Pablo Escobar's hippos. Please, it's my favorite story to tell new people.
It will be your new favorite story, especially for inquiring patrons. Alan Gross, Stephen Lee, Teresa Gleason, Kristen Love, Matt Goff, Jen Squirrel, Alvarez, A Softly Boiled Egg, Christina Hammerberg, Lucy Vin, Sigwany Dana, Gregorius of Tomsk, and Pavka 34, who needed to hear about these cocaine hippos. Yeah, it's a it's a really crazy, crazy thing. So if if you're just new to this, Pablo Escobar, who is a a very famous um narco trafficker.
had four hippos, three females and one male on his ranch and compound. And upon his death in nineteen ninety three, for some reason they just left. Okay. Cut to this many years later, and now there's probably around two hundred hippos roaming wild. in this area of Colombia called the Magdalena River. Turns out It's a great place to be a hippo. Oh no! So hippos do really well. Under good conditions. It's one of the reasons why hippos can start having babies like four years earlier in captivity.
It's because the conditions are so good. So that's what we think happened in Colombia. There's grass everywhere. It's never a dry They never lose water availability. There's unlimited food, unlimited resources, and that's why we've seen this population explode. So what do we do now that there are 200 and maybe more hippos in Colombia? It's a really tough problem. There have been some suggestions and solutions that they've tried, but all of them take a lot of money.
They've tried darting some with contraception. They've tried castrating some of the male. They have actually called one individual, so they shot him. And that may sound terrible to some people and I I'm obviously concerned about hippo welfare, but I'm also concerned about the welfare of Colombians who live there. And there's lots of rare and endangered species in Colombia. There's no easy solution here.
From my perspective, my focus is on protecting hippos in Africa. And that's where we need to be focusing our resources. So the idea of people have talked about like trying to send them to captive facilities, but It doesn't feel like a great use of resources to me because that's not really where they're supposed to be at all. The only reason they're there is because someone had hippos as pets.
I guess this sort of dovetails into the question of Meat, Rebecca Morrison, T Nas, Michael Sherman, Daniel Schmaniel, Jess Sumter, several people asked, Do people eat hippos? They do. And I never have. I'm a vegetarian, but People do eat hippos. There are some groups of folks who have taboos in certain countries and certain areas against eating hippos, but uh in most of the places where I've been, people do eat them.
They have very thick fat layers and sort of like pigs and I've heard that they are extremely yummy and you know people eat a lot of the parts and so that that's a lot of meat for a lot of people. And a few listeners, reigning Emily and Andy Pepper, hoped that I would bring up what patron Mackenzie King wrote instead of a question, offered, This feels like a great place to drop the fun fact I have about hippos, McKenzie writes.
In nineteen ten, Robert Broussard, a Louisiana Senator, proposed that hippos be imported from Africa to Louisiana to be the new version of beef in America. This was due to corporate beef monopolies, beef shortages, and super high prices on beef nationwide. I was like, whoa, raining Emily, Andy Pepper and Mackenzie, I didn't even know about this.
So yeah, the American Hippobill was introduced by Robert Broussard, or as fellow Louisianans called him in the early nineteen hundreds, cousin Bob, and though he had the blessing of Teddy Roosevelt New York Times food writers who attested that Hippo brisket was fatty and tasted like lake cow bacon, and Broussard even had the support of some ecologists looking to solve the invasive water hyacinth problem that was plaguing New Orleans.
As you know, no swamp hippos lurk in our dark American waters. Our sprawling Bass Pro shops don't sell hippo calling devices to locals.
we don't get to see invasive hippos learning to use crosswalks or trying to mate with hot dog carts. But yeah, in other countries, if they got a hippo they may eat a hippo. And one of the threats to hippos is unregulated hunting and in large part it's because they just sit in the water You can take them out with a muzzle loader, you know, an old gun, they're just sitting right there and then you have two thousand pounds of meat. So
In some places where there's been civil unrest or really hungry people, which makes a lot of sense, right? Hippo populations have declined dramatically because people have needed to eat them to survive. Allison Ludwood wanted to know, are there any other animals besides humans that prey on hippos? Or do predators just know to steer clear?
In general, I think the only predator they really are concerned about is people. They're not worried about crocs. That's when crocodiles, that's the quote question that comes up. People ask, oh, you know, wouldn't crocodiles eat baby hippos?
Crocodiles do not stand a chance in the water. Oh really? Mom hippos are extremely protective, as moms are in lots of places, that you don't there's no chance that that the crocodile's gonna get them. I have seen Lions taking down like juvenile hippos, so I know that it happens, but I don't think it's particularly common.
Crocodiles can't even get'em. A crocodile will shred your ass up and down and drown you as casually as eating a Snickers, but they can't fight off a hippo. Who would dare? Not many creatures. If they don't have a ton of enemies, do they have a lot of friends? Like uh Marissa Kay, first time question asker, longtime listener, very excited about hippos, would like to know a little bit more about their social structure. Risa Pereni wants to know if they ever cuddle.
Do they pair or live separately? And patrons Mona Finlayson, Brawny Kiritsing, Storm Kitty Hammond, Colin Roboton, Oliver Callis also asked this and in Bronwyn Iverson's Hugo's words. Do they have best friends? The one best friend I can think of is a really cool mutualistic relationship between hippos and oxpeckers. So if you see hippos that are out of the water or just partially submerged, you'll often see a particular type of bird that sits on them. It's called an oxpecker.
that actually eats like ticks and other insects. So the bird gets free lunch and the hippo gets cleaned. So that's definitely a friend. In terms of their social structure, I think they are really social animals. we don't understand like who's related to who in those herds. Again, we can't barely tell them apart. And for most people, unless you've spent a lot of time looking at hippos, you can't even tell males and females apart. unless they open their mouth.
Their canine teeth for the males are much thicker, their head structure is different, but like they're not sexually dimorphic, right? Sometimes males and females are really different sizes or different colors. They're all gray, they're all fat, they're all really big, and you really can't tell males and females apart when they're, you know, mostly submerged. Sometimes you'll see like creches, which is like groups of
females and lots of offspring, like lots of calves, and they can play together in the water, but again, that's because there's these big groups where it's one dominant male and lots of females and their offspring. Mm-hmm. You know, speaking of males, people asked about Rob Lara, the Pooh helicopter, why? Lena Carpenter wanted to know how do hippos just poop in the water like
The water they're in and then proceed to swim in it like no big deal. Boy, hippo poop spraying. Disgust. Do they have middens? Do they just go wherever? Yeah. Uh there must be so much of it. That is definitely true. is so much of it. And we actually think that hippo poop and not just the poop itself, but like all of the compounds like silica and silicon that's in there are really important nutrients.
for the water areas, the wetlands, the rivers, the lakes where they live. And there's some evidence that like when hippo populations decline, like fish populations also decline. Thank you, patron and first time question asker Allison Ludwig for asking Do tilapia really swim behind them and eat their poo? Alison Ludwig. They do. So yes, Emily G., Ashley Tween, and Rowan Tree. There are symbiotic relationships of plenty in a hippo's life. And so to Gitts and Shiggles and Emma Henson, who asked
I have to befriend one before I die. How do I go about this? The answer is to become a tilapia. You're never gonna be bored, you're never gonna be hungry. Every day is a feast. It is true that hippos, when we ask like where does a hippo poop, the answer is anywhere at once. Mostly it is in the water. But with males, we do see that marking behavior. Another crazy thing. Ready for this? Not really. So what males do is they come out of the water, they start peeing.
And then that spray they spray it backwards and then with their tail use that to like spread with the stream of the pea and the poop coming out. It's gross and yet extremely effective. And I think it's territory marking, although we don't really know this, because we really only see males do that. So we think they're marking their territory. And you'll see it as they come out of the water. They kind of do this at a couple places. Sometimes they'll smush it against like a tree.
or, you know, a rock and I and we think again, we don't know this for sure, but we think it's dominant males marking their territory. Oh my god. Yeah. Which I've seen it in in people's like horrified zoo videos. Oh, oh there we go. 감사합니다. But I hope that that's like a blessing. It it it there's just spreading the love, right? They're spreading the what they do best. And it is one of the things they do best. They're really important nutrient movers and ecosystem engineers in that way.
Um Stacy Bendicson wants to know, do they sleep underwater? No. Mostly when they're sleeping, they're resting above the water. So I remember I was thinking like imagine there's sort of a log, that's the hippo's head. And so mostly when you see them resting, it's they're resting on the bottom.
And that's one of the reasons why their nostrils are really at the end of the log. That's their head. Is so they can breathe that way. So they're only underwater again for at at like five to six minutes, maybe max at a time. It could easily be less. They're not sleeping underwater. Okay. There's no way that they could I I lung capacity wise, but in general they're they're not like snoozing in a pile on the banks though.
They look like logs, honestly, when you go to an area where there's a lot of hippos. And so there's sort of this like small top of the log, that's the hippo that you can see. That's them just sort of And actually I should say, are they sleeping? I don't know. They're certainly resting. We don't a hundred percent 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.
Do you think that scientists are starting to rely more on like drone footage? Is that helpful in terms of getting kind of closer to them and and getting like a better eye on them? Absolutely. That's a 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 can't we count, you know, animals in remote areas. at any one time there could be thirty to forty percent of the populations that's 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 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. In terms of the word the beachmaster, are you you're familiar with that term? Is it I there is a um really long time ago a documentary about hippos and they talked about how there's a beachmaster of hippos.
Or the beach master. A spot in the deepest part of the river is worth fighting for. And I wasn't sure if this is like a very common term for hippos. And this is just a side note, but that term has stuck around me and my my good girlfriend group. for decades now, where the beachmaster is the one in our friend group who now has to decide like where we're gonna go to dinner or like someone needs to beachmaster this'cause I can't deal.
But I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure if Beachmaster's like, no, that's what we call the dominant male. But no, Beachmaster's not a familiar term. It is not a familiar term with me, but it g 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? Yeah. The rest of the guys live in a bachelor herd. you know, 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 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 as associated with a a large Polygonous hurt. It reminds me of like on The Bachelorette when one gets a one on one date and the rest have to hang out at the mansion.
That's exactly it. That they're waiting for their roses. They're waiting for their turn of bat. And they m 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 beachmaster. Do a lot of hippo males divergens? Excellent question. It's very challenging to know how much sneaking there is, right? And for a lot of species where there's like a dominant male.
or even monogam or 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 and get access to the females, what we don't know. And that's something that if we could get like tissue samples or, you know, 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 structure. It's rude probably to say they all look alike, but to our eye, they really do. When it comes to trying to get DNA samples, their skin seems so thick. Is you can't just like run a q tip over their skin and get samples, right? Like what what is it ha you've touched hippos?
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 it, 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 like 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 a hippos. In fact, a colleague of mine, the first tag that we took, and it wasn't a collar tag, it was like a tag that they attached just on the skin was wasn't until 2013 and it stayed on for like a kilometer.
Amazing amazing feet, 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 ant. 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. But they're not a packoderm.
They are not. Nope. Apparently a hippohyde can be two and a half inches thick or six centimeters, which is comparable to a very robust. slab of kitchen countertop or a butcher block made out of wet leather. And speaking of leather, yes, you could buy, say, a wallet made from hippo skin and it looks kind of like
thick, crackly suede. You could buy it, that is, if you had ninety nine dollars plus stacks in shipping and you wanted it. Now they are I found some. They're handmade in Indiana by Amish Craftsman and their website has images demonstrating like it's bill fold and slots for up to eight credit cards. And I was scrolling to the bottom of the description and I spotted this small disclaimer that said, Money and cards are not included. And I'm like
There mu they were m they ha must have gotten one email from a customer who was just enraged that theirs arrived empty. But from seeing red to being tickled pink. What a segue. Let's discuss a question from Miren Carradato, Ingrid Felsel, Disha Titani, Scott Sheldon, Nikki G, Sarah Feloak, Curtis Takahashi, Edward McGregor, Anthony Richards, Kitty King, Ashley Mars, and Sarah Manns, who asked, I beg your finest pardon. Sweating blood?
So speaking of their skin though, sweating blood, what's the deal? Do they sweat red? Is it sunscreen? What's going on? They don't sweat blood, but it is a little bit more than a little bit. 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. important for their thermal regulation, but also that secretion seems to be an important antibiotic. Ooh. I want that a little bit.
Wish I had it, right? I I could really use that. Sounds great. A few mudang questions because Of course. She's the cutest cutest. Who could resist this face? Certainly not these huge crowds lining up at a zoo in Thailand to catch a glimpse of two-month-old mudang. That's Thai for bouncing pigs.
Spell aspiring garbage archaeologists asked, Is it common or somewhat out of the ordinary for a baby hippo to be as ornery as mudang? No shade, I wish I could be as ornery as mudang in public, they ask. Is mudang ornery for a A a young p pygmy hippo? You know, I've asked uh for a couple of their places. Like she does seem to have a a very lively personality. Nothing that she's done that I've seen, it seems like out of the ordinary. Anybody who's taking care
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. What about... some controversy regarding mudang. Jennifer Gorgon said, I heard there was some controversy about the treatment of mudang. Do you have an opinion on the issue? Anna Vilnita wanted to know, would love some professional information.
Are caretakers riling up some captive animals for the reactions that visitors want to see? They asked, and whether online content being the goal is harming the creatures that we seem to love so much. And Natalie Jones asked, Is Mudank doing okay? It seems like having thousands of humans. yelling and looking at you, a day would mess up a baby's development. Is this a stage mother type of situation that needs intervention?
One thing that's been wonderful about having Moo Dang on the scene is that people know about pig me hippos and a lot of people maybe didn't even know they existed. They're not just smaller cominibos. 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 we only got pictures of them in the wild in two thousand and six from remote cameras, not a person with a camera, a camera out there by itself. So
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. You know, there were people throwing Shrimp or other types of food and and hopefully everybody who heard that story realized that the thing that's a danger. Like you can never throw anything into an enclosure that has a wild animal. You may think you're doing
you know, something good, but they have a very strict diet. And I think having folks being respectful, you know, being quiet. is a great thing when you go see animals in captivity because it is stressful and it is important that we're mindful of what their experience is like. So I appreciate those concerns. Okay. Last question. From listeners, Kate Kavanaugh said
Hi Allie, this is Kate in Wakeforce, North Carolina. I served in the Peace Court in Botswana, where I was lucky enough to see hippos in the Ogabonga Delta. I'm wondering what your allologists things might happen to these specific populations given climate change and upstream development in this region. Thanks. A really important point to talk about, which is we talked about hippos being threatened from habitat loss, which is just us.
you know, encroaching, developing areas around freshwater. But climate change is another real s serious threat, particularly for common hippos, but probably pygmies as well. But they rely on water resources in a lot of the places, a lot of the projections of where we think, you know, what's gonna happen, it means less rainfall, less standing water.
I think it's a real threat. It's getting closer as we think about like ensuring coexistence of people and hippos into the future is the fact that the climate is changing and they are so sensitive to these climatic shifts. I would say when we think about like winners and losers of climate change, I would put hippos in the loser category, you know, and and something that we they absolutely it has to be on our radar because these are the resources that they need. Mm-hmm.
Is there any flim flam that you just have to bust that you're like this is not how it is, other than painting them as absolutely cold blooded killers who want nothing more than humans demise? Yes. The whole they kill more than anyone else. Like if I can do one thing in my lifetime, I feel like it's dispel that. Why? They No. It's not right. It's not accurate. Stop saying it. The other flim phlam I guess is It's really just this idea of like, oh, well, there's so many of them.
It's not true. Like I know that they are abundant and they they come in these big groups, but they're really declining in a lot of places. And even in areas where their populations may be stable, they're losing habitat. either directly from human development or because of climate change on on slightly longer scales. But
I think that's a really important one. And I care about elephants too. Like I sometimes come across as like grumpy about elephants. But if I am, it's because elephants just get so much attention. And I know they have incredible behaviors and they you know, mourn their dead and they communicate where we can't hear them and amazing things. But I think hippos have all of these things too. It's just that we can't see it and we don't know it. But they're these incredible animals.
Certainly worthy of a future. What's the worst thing about being a hippopotamologist? I think the worst thing is just that expectation of, oh well, we know everything, but we don't even know how many there are. like basic, basic things. And that's sometimes frustrating because you know, you kinda have to start the conversation from the scratch. And so studying hippos is about studying
human coexistence with them. And I'm really hoping that the sort of the next generation of scientists can use that technology to really think about innovative ways to protect people and protect hippos. What's your favorite thing about hippos? I honestly am captivated by them sort of as these like organisms. Like I said, I am fascinated by all those adaptations, all these things about their body, whether it's their teeth or their stomach or
their skin. It's amazing. And it feels like every time we sort of look under another part of the hippo hood, they have another incredible adaptation to being these semi aquatic, sort of like half whale. half antelope, you know, and that's incredible to me. And I I still find myself captivated, I mean, even though I've been studying this for a long time, by those adaptations, by all of the the things that their bodies are able to do and navigate.
If there were ever one sleeping next to you, would you want to give it a gentle kiss on the nosy? I Wood. I know I know better. I we don't touch wild animals in the wild, but they're um incredible. So yes, I can safely say that if I happen to find one next to me that just wandered up and I could touch it safely. I absolutely would. I wonder if they know how much we love them. That is a good question. They probably don't give a hoot about any of that, but
I would love that if that could really translate to people's passion of saying, I wanna live in a world that has hippos, that has pygmy hippos and common hippos, and I wanna know that they're gonna be here for a really, really long time. Yeah. This whole episode has convinced me that we're in a toxic relationship with hippos. We're the toxic partner because we fawn over them, we love bomb them, and then we take what they need most, we take their habitat. Spread lies about them.
And then we slander them. So if anything, if you love hippos, just know You're the toxic one in the relationship, clean up your act. It's you, it's not them. Yeah, absolutely. So hippo people, happy to answer questions, and we're so very lucky that Dr. Lewison was amenable to answering ours. Thank you again.
Rebecca. And you can find links to her research and lab as well as to the Wei Chow Community Hippo Sanctuary at the link in the show notes. And we also have a link to our new show, Smology's, which are shorter kid-friendly, classroom-safe versions of Ology's classics. They used to be in this feed, but I bounced them to their own feed, so you can look for that show wherever you get podcasts.
It's got new green artwork. We are at Ologies on Blue Sky and Instagram. I'm on there as well as Ally Ward, with just one L and Allie. Thank you to patrons at patreon.com slash ologies for making this show possible. Ologies merch is available at the link in the show notes. Thank you to Aaron Talbert for admitting the Oligies podcast.
Facebook group, Love to Mama Cath, Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts. Kelly Rdwyer does the website. Noelle Dilworth is our scheduling producer. Susan Hale is the beachmaster of a managing director. Jake Chafee edits like a hip. Pro and the mighty Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio lead edits these into submission every week. Nick Thorburn moaned and honked out the theme music. And if you stick around to the end of the episode, I tell you a secret about my life if you want it.
And okay, so this week it's that I wear one of those rings, an aura ring, which I've used for years, but an aura ring helps track sleep and your steps and stress. And no big shocker, um, I've started meditating again literally just in the last week. Um, my soul feels like a hairball in a drain. over current events and I can tell on my aura ring that when I do meditate my heart rate and stress levels go way down. So that is great incentive to like keep at it.
And I was gonna tell you guys that is a secret and I looked at my app today to see, like, yeah, it did go down this morning when I meditated. But I also saw this really sharp spike um in anxiety today and I looked and it was like two hours ago and I realized it was precisely the time when I spilled a quart of fish soup on my pants and the kitchen floor and inside the fridge.
It was like everywhere on in fish soup of all the things. Iced tea, whatever, fine. Fish soup, like Honestly, Anyway, anxiety spike, deep breath. We're doing our best. We're all doing our best. I hope you enjoy a nice bath today, like a hippo would, or you could treat yourself to mud salad, whatever keeps your skin thick and your spirits buoyant, go do it. Okay. Bye bye. The Beachmaster retains his deep water kingdom for now. Yeah.
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