Why scientists want to kill Pablo Escobar's hippos | Hacker News Reader

Why scientists want to kill Pablo Escobar's hippos

bbc.co.uk

27 pointsmatteocapucci12 comments

I've been to Hacienda Napoles (Pablo's estate where the hippos - and zebras, and rhinos and pretend dinosaurs with fake roaring speakers are). There are hotels you can stay in there ( I did not - I stayed in Doradal the nearby city with schools and hospitals built by Escobar). But if you stay in the park you must be in your hotel by 6pm say signs posted everywhere - because the hippos are nocturnal. They stay in the water all day and come out and ...roam and potentially kill at night. I stood for an hour with my toes in the water watching the hippos swim and I fed Vanessa - that is Pablo's pet pigmy hippo who is 'tame'. You buy (for about $1) a tupperware of carrots and celery and feed her. She let me scratch her nose. All of this is to say, Colombians on the ground where the hippos are spreading from have worked out ways to coexist with them.

As a Colombian I think the symbolism alone of getting rid of the hippos is valuable. Of course there are other factors to weigh, but to me, I see Pablo Escobar as no different from a figure like Osama Bin Laden. He was a terrorist who went to war with the country. He blew up planes and airplanes full of in innocent people.

It would be a big negative to me if he got to have a legacy of permanently altering the ecosystem.

This article doesn't touch on it, but there's also a scientific reason to keep them around — they replace similar North American megafauna which was wiped out at the end of the last ice age, likely because of human predation. For example, Giant Ground Sloths actually filled a pretty similar niche to the hippos, but were likely hunted to extinction.

15,000 years seems long, but isn't actually long in biological terms. The Amazon could almost certainly support some megafauna grazers without significant negative impact.

> could almost certainly support some megafauna grazers

I imagine that the difficult to answer questions include:

- how many

- how long would the population stay under that number

On the one hand, I want to believe that this is a good idea. 15k years really isn’t that long, and in geological timescales the climate and ecology isn’t that different.

On the other ... my penchant for Michael Crichton novels makes me skeptical, and I should probably acknowledge there’s some ethical issues with the provenance of these particular animals. That alone shouldn’t mean they need to be euthanized but it’s worth considering.

> The Amazon could almost certainly support

There’s so many variables off the top of the head to consider here, and I’m not even remotely involved in biology: the different species at hand, the evolution that the Amazon underwent in 15k years, the human aspect, and so on, that your certainty comes off as a mere opinion, unless you can substantiate it with some publications. We have pythons in Florida, killing off and reintroduction of wolves in Yellow Stone, lake Victoria, and so many other examples that show how even the slightest alteration of the ecosystem wreaks havoc, despite often having been signed off by the “trust me, I’m a PhD” scientists, that it’s just almost irresponsible to think that we can possibly imagine all the side effects – or lack thereof – such significant change could bring to as complicated and crucial to our planet’s existence ecosystem as Amazon.

I mean I’d rather see Trump crowned as a king of the USA and I’d still have lesser of an existential crisis.

Eh, in my mind the big mitigating factor is that it's not a mistake that's particularly hard to undo if there are indeed negative environmental consequences.

People won't be thrilled about a mass Hippo cull, but... it's not hard to find and kill 1,000 pound animals, in the way it is with Pythons. Our ancestors were great at it. We did a great job with the Buffalo, and Sloths, etc etc. We're doing a great job of wiping out the megafauna that does remain, all over the world.

So I don't personally see a big risk to letting the population grow to a few thousand and seeing what happens. If it goes poorly, we're very well equipped to re-extinct them.

Posted, here, at the time: "Pablo Escobar’s Hippos Fill a Hole Left Since Ice Age Extinctions" https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/science/pablo-escobar-hip...

TIL Hippos have predators in their natural habitats. I found that very surprising; I would imagine the beasts would have to be either very young, old or already quite ailing.

Healthy adult hippos can fight off most predators, so they are largely immune from predation in their natural habitat. There are lots of videos on YouTube of them injuring or killing lions and large crocodiles, although a pride of lions might get lucky on occassion. However, baby and juvenille hippos and old sick hippos are vulnerable.

>> However, baby and juvenille hippos and old sick hippos are vulnerable.

Isn’t this true for all apex predators though?

Hippos are herbivores, no? I get that they are extremely murderous, but apex predators are carnivores that eat other predators, iirc.

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