50 Fun Facts About Hippo

The word 'hippopotamus' comes from Ancient Greek words meaning what?

Híppos is horse and potamós is river; the usual English plural is hippopotamuses.

Which group of animals are the closest living relatives of hippos?

Blood proteins, DNA and fossils all point the same way; the two lineages split about 55 million years ago and share the suborder Whippomorpha.

Roughly how much does an average adult bull hippo weigh?

Cows average about 1.3 tonnes; males seem to keep growing all their lives while females stop at around 25.

Among land mammals, where does the hippo rank by size?

Only elephants and some rhinos are bigger; the hippo is classed as a megaherbivore.

Modern zoo hippo tanks with underwater viewing use glass up to how thick?

One Ohio zoo spent $73 million from 2015 on an exhibit holding three adults in a 250,000-litre tank behind such glass.

Despite living in water, how do hippos actually get around underwater?

Dense bones and a low centre of gravity let them sink; whether they can swim at all is genuinely debated.

How often must an adult hippo surface to breathe?

Young hippos need air every two or three minutes; adults can even sleep submerged, bobbing up without waking.

Hippo skin oozes a red substance nicknamed 'blood sweat'. What does it actually do?

It is neither blood nor sweat: pigments called hipposudoric and norhipposudoric acid absorb UV light and stop bacteria growing.

Up to how long can a hippo's lower canine tusks grow?

The lower canines are honed against the smaller upper ones and are used for fighting rather than feeding.

What makes up almost all of a wild hippo's diet?

They leave the water at dusk and walk 3-5 km a night, eating around 40 kg; they eat surprisingly little aquatic plant matter.

About how much grass does a hippo eat in a night?

That is modest for a 1.5-tonne animal, because it spends the day resting in water and burns little energy.

What top speed are hippos reported to reach on land?

It has never been formally confirmed, but they can hit an airborne stage with all four feet off the ground.

A hippo's wide-open 'yawn' is really what?

Bulls fight with their tusks; the gape shows them off before things get serious.

Where do male hippos hold territories?

A bull's stretch of river or lake can hold five to thirty cows and calves, but everyone grazes alone and unbothered on land.

How long is a hippo's gestation period?

Cows mature at five or six; they mate in the water and can nurse their calves underwater or on land.

Roughly how much does a newborn hippo calf weigh?

Calves are about 127 cm long at birth and may be kept in nurseries guarded by adults.

What is a hippo's typical lifespan?

Zoo hippos can go much further: Bertha in Manila and Lu in Florida both reached 65.

How does the IUCN Red List classify the common hippo?

The population is put at 115,000 to 130,000 and is threatened by habitat loss and poaching for meat and ivory tusks.

Which large reptile do hippos regularly bully or kill because it shares their rivers?

Hippos will avoid crocodiles longer than about 3.5 metres, but displace or kill smaller ones.

Which small relative from the forests of Liberia is the only other living species in the hippo family?

Found mainly in Liberia's forests, it is nocturnal, solitary and was unknown outside West Africa until the 1800s.

Roughly how many pygmy hippos did the IUCN estimate remain in the wild in 2015?

An adult stands only 75-100 cm at the shoulder and weighs 180-275 kg, less than a quarter of its big cousin.

Moo Deng, the pygmy hippo who went viral in September 2024, lives in a zoo in which country?

Her name means 'bouncy pork'; it won a public poll of over 20,000 votes, and daily visitors to Khao Kheow Open Zoo doubled.

Fiona, the premature hippo calf born in January 2017, became the star of which US zoo?

She was the first Nile hippo imaged by prenatal ultrasound and the zoo's first hippo birth in 53 years; a children's hospital helped raise her.

A wild hippo population in Colombia descends from animals kept by which man?

Four hippos arrived at Hacienda Nápoles in 1981; after his death in 1993 they wandered off and had multiplied to about 200 by 2026.

How many hippos did Escobar originally import to his private zoo in 1981?

Three females and one male; by 2007 there were 16 roaming the Magdalena River, and one named Pepe was shot in 2009.

Which Egyptian goddess of childbirth was depicted as an upright female hippopotamus?

She has lion limbs and a crocodile's back and tail, and was known as 'Lady of the Birth House'.

In Egyptian myth, which god takes the form of a red hippopotamus to fight Horus?

He loses; the Ptolemaic historian Manetho also claimed the pharaoh Menes was carried off and killed by a hippo.

Which beast from the Book of Job is widely thought to be based on the hippopotamus?

Job 40:15-24 describes it eating grass like an ox and lying under the lotus among the reeds.

Obaysch, who arrived at London Zoo in 1850, drew 10,000 visitors a day and inspired what?

He was the first zoo hippo of modern times, and the first hippo seen in Europe since the Roman era.

Huberta became a Depression-era celebrity by trekking a great distance across which country?

Her wanderings from Zululand were followed in the newspapers for years, and she is now stuffed in a museum in King William's Town.

Owen, a hippo orphaned by the 2004 tsunami, bonded with what animal at Kenya's Haller Park?

Mzee is an Aldabra giant tortoise about 130 years old; the odd couple became a picture-book bestseller.

Which Greek historian described the hippo in The Histories around 440 BC?

Pliny the Elder covered it in Naturalis Historia around AD 77.

Cut marks on hippo bones from Bolomor Cave in Spain show the animals were butchered by whom?

The fossils date from 230,000 to 120,000 years ago, when hippos lived across southern Europe and even Britain.

Dwarf hippos survived on which island until roughly 1,000 years ago?

Three species shrank through insular dwarfism; villagers in 1976 described a creature called the kilopilopitsofy that might have been a survivor.

Which Congolese national park saw its hippos crash from about 29,000 in the 1970s to under 1,000 by 2005?

Poaching for meat during years of conflict did the damage; numbers have since begun to recover under ranger protection.

In the tabletop game Hungry Hungry Hippos, what are the plastic hippos racing to gobble up?

Fred Kroll's idea was published in 1967 and Milton Bradley launched the game in 1978.

Who sang the 1953 novelty hit 'I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas'?

She was 10 years old and performed it on The Ed Sullivan Show; a legend that it was a zoo fundraiser is not quite true.

In Disney's Fantasia (1940), a ballerina hippo dances to music from which opera?

Ponchielli's 'Dance of the Hours' features Hyacinth Hippo alongside ostriches, elephants and alligators.

Which hippo, voiced by Jada Pinkett Smith, escapes Central Park Zoo with Alex, Marty and Melman?

The four end up stranded on an island off Africa, and the film spawned two sequels, a spin-off and a TV series.

Peter Potamus, the Hanna-Barbera cartoon hippo of 1964, travels the world in what?

He is purple, wears a safari jacket, and his balloon can time-travel at the spin of a dial.

George and Martha, the two hippo friends of James Marshall's picture books, first appeared in which year?

Seven books followed through 1988; the pair bicker but always make up.

Saint Augustine was bishop of Hippo, an ancient city that is now which modern place?

The name has nothing to do with the animal: it is a Latin form of a Punic word probably meaning 'harbour'.

What does the Yoruba name for the hippo, erinmi, mean?

The Greek name likewise means 'river horse'.

According to the historian Manetho, which pharaoh was carried off and killed by a hippopotamus?

The ancient Egyptians recognised the hippo as ferocious and depicted hunts on tomb walls.

Which Baroque painter's 1615-16 work The Hippopotamus and Crocodile Hunt is a rare depiction of the animal?

Hippos were rarely painted in Renaissance and Baroque Europe because artists had so little access to specimens.

What is the most common hippo vocalisation called?

It starts as a high-pitched squeal followed by a deeper resonant call, and hippos recognise individuals by it.

Roughly what was the estimated body mass of the extinct Hippopotamus gorgops?

It lived in Africa and West Asia during the Early to Middle Pleistocene.

In which Saharan mountain range near Djanet has 4,000-5,000-year-old art of hippo hunts been found?

The earliest evidence of modern humans butchering hippos is about 160,000 years old, from the Bouri Formation.

Which country's 1910 'American Hippo bill' proposed introducing hippos to Louisiana?

The idea was to farm the animals for meat in the bayous.

Roughly how many hippos did the IUCN estimate lived in the wild as of 2017?

The population was assessed as stable but the species is listed as vulnerable.