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The Wild Story of What Happened to Pablo Escobar’s Hungry, Hungry Hippos

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Thursday, July 11, 2024

Emily Lankiewicz Four decades ago, Pablo Escobar brought to his Medellín hideaway four hippopotamuses, the centerpieces of a menagerie that included llamas, cheetahs, lions, tigers, ostriches and other exotic fauna. After Colombian police shot Escobar dead in December 1993, veterinarians removed the animals—except the hippos, which were deemed too dangerous to approach. The hippos fled to the nearby Magdalena River and multiplied. Today, the descendants of Escobar’s hippos are believed to number nearly 200. Their uncontrolled growth threatens the region’s fragile waterways. Smithsonian contributor Joshua Hammer joins us to recount this strange history and explain why Colombian conservationists have embarked upon an unusual program to sterilize these hippos in the wild via “invasive surgical castration,” a procedure that is, as he has written for Smithsonian magazine, “medically complicated, expensive and sometimes dangerous for hippos as well as for the people performing it.” Then, ecologist Rebecca Lewison tells us how her long-term study of hippo populations in Africa offers hints of how these creatures will continue to alter the Colombian ecosystem—and what authorities can do about it. A transcript is below. To subscribe to “There’s More to That,” and to listen to past episodes on why we’re still counting calories even though that’s been largely discredited as a healthy eating tool, what the orcas tipping over yachts are really doing, and how the shocking crime perpetrated by wealthy teens Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb a century ago helped to turn true crime into a perennial subject of American public fascination, find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Joshua Hammer: I can’t remember where I first heard about them. I think I must’ve had some awareness of them for the last couple of years. Chris Klimek: Josh Hammer is a journalist and author, and he’s been following a surprising story for Smithsonian magazine, one that goes all the way back to the 1980s. Hammer: That’s when the drug lord Pablo Escobar began importing exotic animals for his hacienda in Antioquia province in northwestern Colombia. Klimek: This was at the height of Pablo Escobar’s wealth and power, and the narco-terrorist wanted to live in a place that fit his larger-than-life image. Hammer: He bought a big patch of property near the Magdalena River, which is the longest river in Colombia, a jungle-y area. He cleared the area and began transforming it into his private playground and began importing these animals, most of them, we believe, from zoos in the U.S. There were kangaroos, there were dolphins for his artificial lakes, elephants. Klimek: But there was one kind of animal that unexpectedly created a wildlife crisis in northern Colombia, one that persists today—a big one. Hammer: The facts are a little murky, but it looks like he imported four hippos, three females and one male, from a zoo or some sort of wildlife refuge, or an animal breeder in either Texas or California. Klimek: You know when you buy two gerbils and then it turns into three or four or five gerbils? Well, the same thing happened with these hippos. And while Escobar eventually had to flee the area, they stuck around. Hammer: After he was killed, fleeing the police in Medellín in 1993, basically the hacienda was abandoned, and the animals fended for themselves. Then the hippos started to expand. They started to move beyond the borders of the hacienda, and here we are 40 years later, and they’re dealing with a population of about, well, rough estimate is about 200 hippos right now—and growing, obviously. Klimek: On its face, this is a pretty ridiculous situation. A drug lord’s feral hippos, swimming in the waters, eating their way through the Colombian jungles, interacting with the local populations, animal and human. But when you start to dig deeper, there’s a lot to be learned here about both the consequences of human behavior and conservation crises across the globe. From Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions, this is “There’s More to That,” the show where we’re hungry, hungry for stories about invasive hippos. In this episode, one of the most complicated wildlife puzzles in the world and what it means for both animals and humans. I’m Chris Klimek.Klimek: Hi, it’s Chris. I hope you’re enjoying “There’s More to That.” We hope that our episodes are giving you a sense of what the world of Smithsonian magazine is all about, and we’d love to hear from you what you think of this season. More importantly, we want to know what you’d like to hear more of. Your input is key. If you have the time to help us design our future episodes, please take this survey. You can find it at SmithsonianMag.com/podcastsurvey. We’ll also put a link in our show notes. It should take about five minutes. Thanks again and, as always, thanks for listening.Klimek: So since it’s been more than 30 years and not all our listeners may know, who was Pablo Escobar? Hammer: Well, Escobar was born in a working-class neighborhood of Medellín. When he was in his teens, however, he began essentially a life of crime doing things like stealing tombstones from graveyards and sanding off the names and reselling them, and just forging documents, all sorts of stuff. And then in his early 20s, he began running cocaine. I guess at the time, neighboring countries like Peru and Bolivia were producers, and he was bringing the cocaine in, processed and unprocessed, flying it up in a small plane to landing strips in the United States. And later he got involved with a couple of other Colombian dealers and formed what became known as the Medellín Cartel, which pretty much controlled all cocaine trafficking for years between Colombia and the United States. And so he grew extremely wealthy and bought his way into a seat in the Colombian parliament, and was living with total impunity and making billions of dollars until the mid-’80s, when it all caught up with him. Klimek: What was life like in Colombia during Pablo Escobar’s lifetime? Hammer: Very violent. The drug traffickers were carrying out their own terrible acts of violence in the mid-’80s. Escobar was carrying out assassinations. He had death squads killing his enemies, car bombings. In 1989, an unwitting courier carried a bomb onboard an Avianca jet, which blew up mid-flight, killed about 130 people. It was savage. On top of that, you had this escalating civil war going on between FARC, the communist, Marxist guerrilla movement in Colombia, and the Colombian government. And then on top of that, you had these, what they call the autodefensas, which were these right-wing vigilante death squads, which were often in league with drug lords. They were getting a cut of the action from the drug trade, and they were also involved in killing suspected Marxists. So there were three major violent actors all causing chaos during the ’80s and ’90s in Colombia. It was a very, very difficult time. Up to 30,000 people were being killed in a year at the peak of the violence in Colombia. Klimek: Escobar cultivated an image of power amidst the violence and turmoil. Josh says we can only speculate about how the hippos fit into that picture. Hammer: Apparently there were a couple of other drug lords in South America that he was emulating. There’s something about this kind of criminality and these menageries, there’s an association with power and prestige to have wild animals, to be the master of your own menagerie. This menagerie that he built up served another purpose, too, because he opened it up to the public. He allowed local Colombians to come onto his property and do a safari in electric vehicles around the grounds. So this, of course, helped to make him a very popular figure among a lot of Colombians when he was just spreading the money around and sponsoring soccer clubs. And then this was part of the same scheme to establish roots in the community, make him a popular figure. Klimek: Where is he keeping these animals? Hammer: He kept them on a property called Hacienda Nápoles. It’s about three hours east of Medellín. It’s a big area. He built artificial lakes and his mansion, his villa there, and he had 1,500 people working on the grounds, free-roaming menagerie of animals, helicopter pad, dinosaur theme park, just some other weird stuff. There was also a bull ring, et cetera, et cetera. Klimek: How did the hippos end up roaming freely outside of the grounds of the hacienda? Hammer: So there were never any real borders of this hacienda. It was carved out of the wilderness. So within a few days of his being killed, a lot of people stormed the grounds. They ripped everything apart looking for money, looking for weapons. The place was in chaos. The staff fled, and nobody came back to tend the animals. The animals for a while were living on their own. After it fell into disrepair, it was eventually taken over by a private corporation and reborn as a safari park. I understand from talking to an official in the local government who was a young man in those days that there were electric vehicles that would take you around and let you tour the savanna. Elephants would come over to the vehicles and stick their trunk, just like an imitation African safari. Finally, the government decided to do something about it, so this would’ve been about maybe ’98, ’99. They gathered up the animals, and they shipped most of them off to three zoos in Colombia. But nobody wanted to get near the hippos because they were frightened of them, and so the hippos were left to their own devices. By that time, there may have been 10, 12, I’m not sure, but, I mean, the females can produce a baby every year and a half, and they can be incredibly fertile. Klimek: Then an almost Shakespearean power struggle began to play out. Hammer: The oldest male born of these three female hippos wanted to be the alpha male and basically killed his own father and established a new hippo pod, and that’s the dynamic that happens. A male hippo will get in a fight with the alpha male and be exiled from the herd and then have to go off and find his own environment and wander off a few kilometers, get a female or two—boom, a new hippo herd is created. And this is what’s been happening slowly over the decades. Some of these hippos have been spotted like 50 miles outside of the boundaries of the Hacienda Nápoles. So they can really wander far. Klimek: How are the hippos in the region faring now? Hammer: I think they’re thriving. They don’t have any natural predators. They’re not hunted, and they have access to a lot of water and a lot of fruit and a lot of vegetables and a lot of vegetation, all the things that hippos need. So they’re doing very well. Klimek: And why does that present a threat to people and to the environment? Hammer: I think there is this exaggerated threat about just how dangerous hippos are. I mean, you often see media reports of them being the most dangerous animal. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I think that they can be aggressive. I think generally they’re pretty gentle. It’s sort of like, you leave me alone, I’ll leave you alone. But from what I understand, if you get pretty dense human populations and pretty dense hippo populations competing for the same territory—fishermen on the rivers and people settling the land along the rivers—and so you get a lot of opportunities for hippo-human clashes. Last year in a schoolyard, one hippo just wandered in, and kids were scared, teachers running every which way. And if you’re on a boat, they can come up underneath and drown you. They’re not totally harmless animals. Klimek: The presence of hippos has also changed the Magdalena River itself. Hammer: Another reason that people are concerned is just because they produce an awful lot of excrement. They can really pollute water resources. They’re an invasive species. They don’t really belong there. So the local species that are there, like the capybaras, the tortoises, other animals, it’s rapidly changing the biome and possibly threatening these other animals. Algae, bacteriological contamination, there definitely seems to be something going on with the water in Colombia in these areas. Klimek: How have authorities tried to solve the problem of this exploding hippo population in Colombia? Hammer: The first thing they did was way back in the early 2000s, a professional hunter was hired, and he actually shot and killed a hippo that had wandered about 50 miles or so outside the hacienda and then posed with the corpse of his hippo, and it created a huge uproar in Colombia. I believe this was 2008, maybe 2009. Then there was a series of protests in Bogotá, and all across Colombia people were outraged and distraught. The minister of the environment had to resign, and they basically declared a moratorium on killing hippos. They started to try to dart hippos in the wild and do these castrations. That didn’t really work, because the tranquilizers take a while to have an effect, and it was dangerous to follow these hippos around, and so the hippos would generally disappear. They managed to do this once. They were able to track a hippo and castrate it after the tranquilizer knocked him out. And then they tried chemical castrations, where they would dart it with a chemical. But the problem with that method is that they would have to use a two-step process, and it was almost impossible to track the hippo to deliver the second dart two months later. So that didn’t work. They tried to cordon off the hacienda, but that didn’t work either, because first of all, many of the hippos had already left the hacienda, and second of all, the property was too large. They couldn’t really construct anything strong enough to keep the animals in, so that didn’t work. They tried getting international zoos to take the hippos, and that created a huge protest among environmental groups who didn’t believe that the resources should be spent with this translocation program. And most zoos didn’t want them anyway, so that didn’t work. Finally, last year, they began this aggressive surgical castration campaign using traps and corrals and trying to lure the animals into these corrals, keeping them trapped, and then sterilizing them on the spot, and that has had a certain amount of success. So they’ve done about ten so far. The project began in earnest in October, and from what I understand, they were forced to stop for a couple of months because of a contract renegotiation and budget disputes. But now they apparently have picked it up again. So it’s averaging one and a half a month or something. They say that they need to sterilize at least 40 a year to keep the population from growing. So they’re falling short, and it’s a really difficult procedure. They’re getting better at it, clearly, but it still doesn’t seem to be sufficient to deal with the numbers.Rebecca Lewison: I remember somebody telling me, and I thought, “What? That can’t be right. There’s no way. How would there be hippos in Colombia?” Klimek: Rebecca Lewison is an ecologist at San Diego State University. She’s also co-chair of the Hippo Specialist Group of IUCN, an international conservation organization. She mostly spends her time worrying about hippos in Africa, but at some point in the late ’90s or early 2000s, she started getting inquiries about the Colombian hippos. Lewison: I’ve never been to Colombia, but what it looks like is a paradise for hippos, water everywhere, grass everywhere. I mean, I can see why they are thriving. Klimek: We went to Rebecca for some more in-depth information about hippo biology, conservation, and some ideas for a potential solution in Colombia. But we began the conversation by asking: What’s it like to see a hippo up close in the wild? Lewison: It’s just like, “Oh, my God, they’re so big,” which is kind of dumb, since you know they’re this massive animal. But when you first see them in the water, you just see that the top surface of their heads and their backs, and then when they actually come out, it’s the iceberg, there’s a lot under there. Klimek: What makes it hard to study hippos in the wild? Lewison: The challenge with hippos in the wild is when you go to a place that has hippos, they’re seemingly everywhere, which is not, of course, really true, but you’ll see a lot of them. They all come together and bunch up in rivers or lakes, but they’re really tough to study. And so compared to even other big gray things like elephants and rhinos, we really know comparatively little about them, because they are essentially marine mammals. They’re in the water all day and they only come out at night to feed. So nighttime is a tough time to be doing fieldwork, not super safe, and most of the places where they’re in the water, you can’t get in there with them. It’s a hundred percent not safe either because of hippos or because of crocodiles, and the water is not clear, so we don’t really know what’s happening. Other things that make them really hard to study is they basically don’t have a neck. So most of the ways that we put collars on animals, it goes around their neck, and they don’t have a neck. They use their neck, and so collaring them doesn’t really work. And in another just crazy turn of events, they are very difficult to chemically immobilize or tranquilize. We don’t really understand it, but they tend to not do well with all the drugs that we use for elephants and rhinos. It’s just made it really hard to study them and learn really basic things like who’s related to who. Identifying individuals is really tough, because we don’t really see much of them. Counting hippos is really hard, and you’d say, “Well, why? They’re massive, 4,000, 5,000 pounds.” But they’re in the water, and counting things in the water is really tough. They submerge. They don’t just stay. It’s not like you can say, “OK, everybody out of the water. I have to count you.” We’re increasingly using drones, but even with that, that can cause disturbance, so maybe a hippo will go underwater. Klimek: What’s the biggest threat to hippos in their native habitat now? Lewison: The biggest threat is definitely habitat loss. They require freshwater, and that really puts them at the crosshairs of people who also really rely on freshwater. And that’s probably the most valuable and limited resource on Earth, is freshwater, and it really puts them in direct conflict with people. Right behind that is a threat that is here but is potentially intensifying, which is just the impacts of climate change, because we know that impacts water quality and quantity. But I think it really all of that boils down to they just are running out of places to be. Klimek: Where are global hippo populations now, generally? Lewison: We don’t have great, great counts of them, but we think there’s about 200,000 to 300,000, which is surprisingly few. That’s even less elephants than there are. From a conservation perspective, there’s certainly populations in countries where hippo populations seem to be stable—those are typically in eastern and southern Africa—and definitely countries where hippo populations are declining, which is absolutely in western African countries. And in large part that is actually driven by just large-scale habitat loss. So overall the conservation outlook is not great. They are listed on the IUCN Red List, which is our international way of keeping track of the conservation status of animals, and they are listed as vulnerable because of that. And just increasingly, we just have concerns about their viability going forward. Klimek: The hippo situation in Colombia is completely unprecedented, so Rebecca says she has to look to African hippos for answers about what’s going on. Lewison: Hippos in Africa really exhibit this sort of boom-bust cycle oftentimes, particularly in places where the water and grass resources vary a lot within a year, which is a lot of places in eastern, southern Africa that have a dry season and a wet season. When there’s a drought, hippo populations can crash, a lot of mortality, both of adults and absolutely of juveniles because of either not enough water or not enough resources. What we also see for hippo populations, which is what makes a lot of us optimistic for a future for hippos, is that they respond very well to good conditions. When there’s a lot of rain and a lot of water, we see hippo populations flourish and really grow and expand and increase very quickly, and that’s certainly what they seem to have in Colombia. One thing that I think is interesting in Colombia is I think they’re spending a lot more time out of the water than hippos do in Africa, in part because the climate, it’s humid, it’s much more forgiving for a hippo. They have pretty sensitive skin, which is funny to say because they also are known to have some of the thickest skin, but there’s some sensitivity around them. Without water, they will die, or moisture, but I think they have that. And so maybe that’s another reason that people are really connecting to them is they can see them so much more than you can in the African context. Klimek: Many places, non-native animal populations have been controlled by introducing predator species. Why would that not work here? Lewison: I just don’t know what you’d introduce. The largest predator to the hippo, the most pervasive threat from predation for hippos is people. It is true that in Africa, lions, they will hunt younger hippos, smaller hippos. I don’t think we want to introduce African lions to Colombia. They certainly have their own carnivores, but it’s just not going to happen. There just isn’t anything bigger. Dinosaurs? We’ve all seen that movie, so we know how that goes. We don’t have an option here of going up the food chain. Their skin is that thick. Save with a gun, they’re pretty hard to kill, and I don’t think there’s going to be a strategy to introduce anything that’s big enough to get them. And honestly, predation just doesn’t have a big impact even in African settings. It’s really the environment that controls hippo populations. Klimek: How do you feel about the possibility of culling these hippos? Should that be considered as a potential solution? Lewison: It’s a tough question, again, because of how I think folks in the area have really identified with the hippos, absolutely are concerned about animal welfare, and I obviously take all of that very seriously as well. I just don’t think at this point there’s any really good solutions. The good solution needed to come in 1993, and we’re way beyond that. So now the situation where we are, the fork in the road, I do think that this approach makes sense. I honestly do worry about the potential of hippo-human conflict. I’ve spent a lot of time with hippos. I don’t find them to be particularly aggressive, but in areas where they are constantly under pressure, the analogy I typically use, the first time someone, if they break into your house, you’re surprised. By time ten, if someone breaks into your house, you’re ready to attack. And I think that’s where we see a lot of hippo-human conflict that have led to human fatalities. Typically, I’m one of the people that when there is an attack that people call and say, “What can you tell us? What should we do?” And in the African settings, I think I wouldn’t get in a boat, in a canoe. I’m not interested in those trips because I am the person who hears about all of them that go south. I feel differently about being on land around hippos, but in the water in particular, there’s not much you can do. If a hippo is under threat and they’re coming for you, that’s not the time to be saying, “Well, what could I have done differently in this situation?” But yeah, there really aren’t any easy answers here in terms of protecting people, which I think is the most at the top of the list. Of course, protecting hippos, but I would put in front of that even protecting the native plants and animals. This is their national treasure and something that I know they want to protect. Klimek: So taking into account everything you’ve been saying about how this is a complex problem and none of the potential solutions are particularly good, what would be your recommendation as to how to balance human needs and wildlife needs? Lewison: I think we’re on the path. The folks that I’ve talked to and heard from are trying to be thoughtful to all of the sides, to the people who feel connected to the animals, obviously to the animals themselves and their welfare, but also to the native plants and animals. And I think we are now hopefully moving toward the place of making this somewhat more sustainable. Of course, I have those fears of potential conflict if the population does grow. You hear stories of people getting gored by bison in Yellowstone. That’s because people do dumb things around wild animals. And even though these are animals that are not from here, they are still wild. What I always want people to understand is the place where hippos are from is Africa, and the place where they really need desperate attention and support and conservation action is Africa, because while they’re thriving in Colombia, they are not thriving in the land where they have evolved. And that’s where I spend most of my time, is really trying to get organizations and governments and agencies to collaborate and coordinate so we can come up with sustainable conservation plans that absolutely protect people and their livelihoods and hippos and their ability to persist into the future. I love that there’s a whole new group of people who didn’t even know about hippos, had never even thought about them, and now care about them, and I just hope that that extends to caring about hippos where they’re from. Klimek: Rebecca Lewison is a conservation ecologist and professor at San Diego State University. She’s the director of SDSU’s Institute for Ecological Management and Monitoring. Thank you, Rebecca. This has been a fascinating talk. Lewison: Great to talk with you, Chris. Thanks so much.Klimek: To read Josh Hammer’s reporting about the Colombian hippos, go to SmithsonianMag.com. We’ll put a link to it in our show notes along with links to some of Lewison’s work. This week’s dinner party fact goes back to a time and place where hippos were presented as a potential solution to a problem rather than the cause of one—equally shocking, though. Donny Bajohr: Hey, everyone. I’m Donny Bajohr, one of three photo editors here at the magazine, and I have a tasty treat for you for this episode’s dinner party fact. In the early 20th century, America had a problem—actually, two problems. They had a meat shortage and they had an invasive species in the South, the hyacinth. So Congressman Robert Broussard brought a bill to the House to solve both problems with one animal: the hippo. He wanted to bring over the hippo to eat up some hyacinth and feed Americans. Congressman Broussard’s bill didn’t pass, but it’s too bad, because I would love to hang a fang in some hippo meat. Klimek (laughing): “Hang a fang!” Did you just come up with that? Bajohr: You never heard that phrase? Klimek: No. “Hang a fang.” I love it. Klimek: “There’s More to That” is a production of Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions. From the magazine, our team is me, Debra Rosenberg and Brian Wolly. From PRX, our team is Jessica Miller, Genevieve Sponsler, Adriana Rozas Rivera, Ry Dorsey and Edwin Ochoa. The executive producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales. Our episode artwork is by Emily Lankiewicz. Fact-checking by Stephanie Abramson. Our music is from APM Music. I’m Chris Klimek. Thank you for listening. Get the latest Science stories in your inbox.

Ever since the demise of infamous drug kingpin, his pet hippos have flourished, wreaking havoc on the ecosystem and terrorizing local communities

Smithmag-Podcast-S02-Ep11-Hippo-article.jpg
Emily Lankiewicz

Four decades ago, Pablo Escobar brought to his Medellín hideaway four hippopotamuses, the centerpieces of a menagerie that included llamas, cheetahs, lions, tigers, ostriches and other exotic fauna. After Colombian police shot Escobar dead in December 1993, veterinarians removed the animals—except the hippos, which were deemed too dangerous to approach. The hippos fled to the nearby Magdalena River and multiplied.

Today, the descendants of Escobar’s hippos are believed to number nearly 200. Their uncontrolled growth threatens the region’s fragile waterways. Smithsonian contributor Joshua Hammer joins us to recount this strange history and explain why Colombian conservationists have embarked upon an unusual program to sterilize these hippos in the wild via “invasive surgical castration,” a procedure that is, as he has written for Smithsonian magazine, “medically complicated, expensive and sometimes dangerous for hippos as well as for the people performing it.” Then, ecologist Rebecca Lewison tells us how her long-term study of hippo populations in Africa offers hints of how these creatures will continue to alter the Colombian ecosystem—and what authorities can do about it.

A transcript is below. To subscribe to “There’s More to That,” and to listen to past episodes on why we’re still counting calories even though that’s been largely discredited as a healthy eating tool, what the orcas tipping over yachts are really doing, and how the shocking crime perpetrated by wealthy teens Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb a century ago helped to turn true crime into a perennial subject of American public fascination, find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.


Joshua Hammer: I can’t remember where I first heard about them. I think I must’ve had some awareness of them for the last couple of years.

Chris Klimek: Josh Hammer is a journalist and author, and he’s been following a surprising story for Smithsonian magazine, one that goes all the way back to the 1980s.

Hammer: That’s when the drug lord Pablo Escobar began importing exotic animals for his hacienda in Antioquia province in northwestern Colombia.

Klimek: This was at the height of Pablo Escobar’s wealth and power, and the narco-terrorist wanted to live in a place that fit his larger-than-life image.

Hammer: He bought a big patch of property near the Magdalena River, which is the longest river in Colombia, a jungle-y area. He cleared the area and began transforming it into his private playground and began importing these animals, most of them, we believe, from zoos in the U.S. There were kangaroos, there were dolphins for his artificial lakes, elephants.

Klimek: But there was one kind of animal that unexpectedly created a wildlife crisis in northern Colombia, one that persists today—a big one.

Hammer: The facts are a little murky, but it looks like he imported four hippos, three females and one male, from a zoo or some sort of wildlife refuge, or an animal breeder in either Texas or California.

Klimek: You know when you buy two gerbils and then it turns into three or four or five gerbils? Well, the same thing happened with these hippos. And while Escobar eventually had to flee the area, they stuck around.

Hammer: After he was killed, fleeing the police in Medellín in 1993, basically the hacienda was abandoned, and the animals fended for themselves. Then the hippos started to expand. They started to move beyond the borders of the hacienda, and here we are 40 years later, and they’re dealing with a population of about, well, rough estimate is about 200 hippos right now—and growing, obviously.

Klimek: On its face, this is a pretty ridiculous situation. A drug lord’s feral hippos, swimming in the waters, eating their way through the Colombian jungles, interacting with the local populations, animal and human. But when you start to dig deeper, there’s a lot to be learned here about both the consequences of human behavior and conservation crises across the globe.

From Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions, this is “There’s More to That,” the show where we’re hungry, hungry for stories about invasive hippos. In this episode, one of the most complicated wildlife puzzles in the world and what it means for both animals and humans. I’m Chris Klimek.


Klimek: Hi, it’s Chris. I hope you’re enjoying “There’s More to That.” We hope that our episodes are giving you a sense of what the world of Smithsonian magazine is all about, and we’d love to hear from you what you think of this season. More importantly, we want to know what you’d like to hear more of. Your input is key. If you have the time to help us design our future episodes, please take this survey. You can find it at SmithsonianMag.com/podcastsurvey. We’ll also put a link in our show notes. It should take about five minutes. Thanks again and, as always, thanks for listening.


Klimek: So since it’s been more than 30 years and not all our listeners may know, who was Pablo Escobar?

Hammer: Well, Escobar was born in a working-class neighborhood of Medellín. When he was in his teens, however, he began essentially a life of crime doing things like stealing tombstones from graveyards and sanding off the names and reselling them, and just forging documents, all sorts of stuff. And then in his early 20s, he began running cocaine.

I guess at the time, neighboring countries like Peru and Bolivia were producers, and he was bringing the cocaine in, processed and unprocessed, flying it up in a small plane to landing strips in the United States. And later he got involved with a couple of other Colombian dealers and formed what became known as the Medellín Cartel, which pretty much controlled all cocaine trafficking for years between Colombia and the United States. And so he grew extremely wealthy and bought his way into a seat in the Colombian parliament, and was living with total impunity and making billions of dollars until the mid-’80s, when it all caught up with him.

Klimek: What was life like in Colombia during Pablo Escobar’s lifetime?

Hammer: Very violent. The drug traffickers were carrying out their own terrible acts of violence in the mid-’80s. Escobar was carrying out assassinations. He had death squads killing his enemies, car bombings. In 1989, an unwitting courier carried a bomb onboard an Avianca jet, which blew up mid-flight, killed about 130 people. It was savage.

On top of that, you had this escalating civil war going on between FARC, the communist, Marxist guerrilla movement in Colombia, and the Colombian government. And then on top of that, you had these, what they call the autodefensas, which were these right-wing vigilante death squads, which were often in league with drug lords. They were getting a cut of the action from the drug trade, and they were also involved in killing suspected Marxists. So there were three major violent actors all causing chaos during the ’80s and ’90s in Colombia. It was a very, very difficult time. Up to 30,000 people were being killed in a year at the peak of the violence in Colombia.

Klimek: Escobar cultivated an image of power amidst the violence and turmoil. Josh says we can only speculate about how the hippos fit into that picture.

Hammer: Apparently there were a couple of other drug lords in South America that he was emulating. There’s something about this kind of criminality and these menageries, there’s an association with power and prestige to have wild animals, to be the master of your own menagerie. This menagerie that he built up served another purpose, too, because he opened it up to the public.

He allowed local Colombians to come onto his property and do a safari in electric vehicles around the grounds. So this, of course, helped to make him a very popular figure among a lot of Colombians when he was just spreading the money around and sponsoring soccer clubs. And then this was part of the same scheme to establish roots in the community, make him a popular figure.

Klimek: Where is he keeping these animals?

Hammer: He kept them on a property called Hacienda Nápoles. It’s about three hours east of Medellín. It’s a big area. He built artificial lakes and his mansion, his villa there, and he had 1,500 people working on the grounds, free-roaming menagerie of animals, helicopter pad, dinosaur theme park, just some other weird stuff. There was also a bull ring, et cetera, et cetera.

Klimek: How did the hippos end up roaming freely outside of the grounds of the hacienda?

Hammer: So there were never any real borders of this hacienda. It was carved out of the wilderness. So within a few days of his being killed, a lot of people stormed the grounds. They ripped everything apart looking for money, looking for weapons. The place was in chaos. The staff fled, and nobody came back to tend the animals.

The animals for a while were living on their own. After it fell into disrepair, it was eventually taken over by a private corporation and reborn as a safari park. I understand from talking to an official in the local government who was a young man in those days that there were electric vehicles that would take you around and let you tour the savanna. Elephants would come over to the vehicles and stick their trunk, just like an imitation African safari.

Finally, the government decided to do something about it, so this would’ve been about maybe ’98, ’99. They gathered up the animals, and they shipped most of them off to three zoos in Colombia. But nobody wanted to get near the hippos because they were frightened of them, and so the hippos were left to their own devices. By that time, there may have been 10, 12, I’m not sure, but, I mean, the females can produce a baby every year and a half, and they can be incredibly fertile.

Klimek: Then an almost Shakespearean power struggle began to play out.

Hammer: The oldest male born of these three female hippos wanted to be the alpha male and basically killed his own father and established a new hippo pod, and that’s the dynamic that happens. A male hippo will get in a fight with the alpha male and be exiled from the herd and then have to go off and find his own environment and wander off a few kilometers, get a female or two—boom, a new hippo herd is created. And this is what’s been happening slowly over the decades. Some of these hippos have been spotted like 50 miles outside of the boundaries of the Hacienda Nápoles. So they can really wander far.

Klimek: How are the hippos in the region faring now?

Hammer: I think they’re thriving. They don’t have any natural predators. They’re not hunted, and they have access to a lot of water and a lot of fruit and a lot of vegetables and a lot of vegetation, all the things that hippos need. So they’re doing very well.

Klimek: And why does that present a threat to people and to the environment?

Hammer: I think there is this exaggerated threat about just how dangerous hippos are. I mean, you often see media reports of them being the most dangerous animal. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I think that they can be aggressive. I think generally they’re pretty gentle. It’s sort of like, you leave me alone, I’ll leave you alone.

But from what I understand, if you get pretty dense human populations and pretty dense hippo populations competing for the same territory—fishermen on the rivers and people settling the land along the rivers—and so you get a lot of opportunities for hippo-human clashes. Last year in a schoolyard, one hippo just wandered in, and kids were scared, teachers running every which way. And if you’re on a boat, they can come up underneath and drown you. They’re not totally harmless animals.

Klimek: The presence of hippos has also changed the Magdalena River itself.

Hammer: Another reason that people are concerned is just because they produce an awful lot of excrement. They can really pollute water resources. They’re an invasive species. They don’t really belong there. So the local species that are there, like the capybaras, the tortoises, other animals, it’s rapidly changing the biome and possibly threatening these other animals. Algae, bacteriological contamination, there definitely seems to be something going on with the water in Colombia in these areas.

Klimek: How have authorities tried to solve the problem of this exploding hippo population in Colombia?

Hammer: The first thing they did was way back in the early 2000s, a professional hunter was hired, and he actually shot and killed a hippo that had wandered about 50 miles or so outside the hacienda and then posed with the corpse of his hippo, and it created a huge uproar in Colombia. I believe this was 2008, maybe 2009. Then there was a series of protests in Bogotá, and all across Colombia people were outraged and distraught. The minister of the environment had to resign, and they basically declared a moratorium on killing hippos.

They started to try to dart hippos in the wild and do these castrations. That didn’t really work, because the tranquilizers take a while to have an effect, and it was dangerous to follow these hippos around, and so the hippos would generally disappear. They managed to do this once. They were able to track a hippo and castrate it after the tranquilizer knocked him out.

And then they tried chemical castrations, where they would dart it with a chemical. But the problem with that method is that they would have to use a two-step process, and it was almost impossible to track the hippo to deliver the second dart two months later. So that didn’t work.

They tried to cordon off the hacienda, but that didn’t work either, because first of all, many of the hippos had already left the hacienda, and second of all, the property was too large. They couldn’t really construct anything strong enough to keep the animals in, so that didn’t work.

They tried getting international zoos to take the hippos, and that created a huge protest among environmental groups who didn’t believe that the resources should be spent with this translocation program. And most zoos didn’t want them anyway, so that didn’t work.

Finally, last year, they began this aggressive surgical castration campaign using traps and corrals and trying to lure the animals into these corrals, keeping them trapped, and then sterilizing them on the spot, and that has had a certain amount of success. So they’ve done about ten so far. The project began in earnest in October, and from what I understand, they were forced to stop for a couple of months because of a contract renegotiation and budget disputes.

But now they apparently have picked it up again. So it’s averaging one and a half a month or something. They say that they need to sterilize at least 40 a year to keep the population from growing. So they’re falling short, and it’s a really difficult procedure. They’re getting better at it, clearly, but it still doesn’t seem to be sufficient to deal with the numbers.


Rebecca Lewison: I remember somebody telling me, and I thought, “What? That can’t be right. There’s no way. How would there be hippos in Colombia?”

Klimek: Rebecca Lewison is an ecologist at San Diego State University. She’s also co-chair of the Hippo Specialist Group of IUCN, an international conservation organization. She mostly spends her time worrying about hippos in Africa, but at some point in the late ’90s or early 2000s, she started getting inquiries about the Colombian hippos.

Lewison: I’ve never been to Colombia, but what it looks like is a paradise for hippos, water everywhere, grass everywhere. I mean, I can see why they are thriving.

Klimek: We went to Rebecca for some more in-depth information about hippo biology, conservation, and some ideas for a potential solution in Colombia. But we began the conversation by asking: What’s it like to see a hippo up close in the wild?

Lewison: It’s just like, “Oh, my God, they’re so big,” which is kind of dumb, since you know they’re this massive animal. But when you first see them in the water, you just see that the top surface of their heads and their backs, and then when they actually come out, it’s the iceberg, there’s a lot under there.

Klimek: What makes it hard to study hippos in the wild?

Lewison: The challenge with hippos in the wild is when you go to a place that has hippos, they’re seemingly everywhere, which is not, of course, really true, but you’ll see a lot of them. They all come together and bunch up in rivers or lakes, but they’re really tough to study. And so compared to even other big gray things like elephants and rhinos, we really know comparatively little about them, because they are essentially marine mammals. They’re in the water all day and they only come out at night to feed.

So nighttime is a tough time to be doing fieldwork, not super safe, and most of the places where they’re in the water, you can’t get in there with them. It’s a hundred percent not safe either because of hippos or because of crocodiles, and the water is not clear, so we don’t really know what’s happening.

Other things that make them really hard to study is they basically don’t have a neck. So most of the ways that we put collars on animals, it goes around their neck, and they don’t have a neck. They use their neck, and so collaring them doesn’t really work.

And in another just crazy turn of events, they are very difficult to chemically immobilize or tranquilize. We don’t really understand it, but they tend to not do well with all the drugs that we use for elephants and rhinos. It’s just made it really hard to study them and learn really basic things like who’s related to who.

Identifying individuals is really tough, because we don’t really see much of them. Counting hippos is really hard, and you’d say, “Well, why? They’re massive, 4,000, 5,000 pounds.” But they’re in the water, and counting things in the water is really tough. They submerge. They don’t just stay. It’s not like you can say, “OK, everybody out of the water. I have to count you.” We’re increasingly using drones, but even with that, that can cause disturbance, so maybe a hippo will go underwater.

Klimek: What’s the biggest threat to hippos in their native habitat now?

Lewison: The biggest threat is definitely habitat loss. They require freshwater, and that really puts them at the crosshairs of people who also really rely on freshwater. And that’s probably the most valuable and limited resource on Earth, is freshwater, and it really puts them in direct conflict with people.

Right behind that is a threat that is here but is potentially intensifying, which is just the impacts of climate change, because we know that impacts water quality and quantity. But I think it really all of that boils down to they just are running out of places to be.

Klimek: Where are global hippo populations now, generally?

Lewison: We don’t have great, great counts of them, but we think there’s about 200,000 to 300,000, which is surprisingly few. That’s even less elephants than there are. From a conservation perspective, there’s certainly populations in countries where hippo populations seem to be stable—those are typically in eastern and southern Africa—and definitely countries where hippo populations are declining, which is absolutely in western African countries. And in large part that is actually driven by just large-scale habitat loss.

So overall the conservation outlook is not great. They are listed on the IUCN Red List, which is our international way of keeping track of the conservation status of animals, and they are listed as vulnerable because of that. And just increasingly, we just have concerns about their viability going forward.

Klimek: The hippo situation in Colombia is completely unprecedented, so Rebecca says she has to look to African hippos for answers about what’s going on.

Lewison: Hippos in Africa really exhibit this sort of boom-bust cycle oftentimes, particularly in places where the water and grass resources vary a lot within a year, which is a lot of places in eastern, southern Africa that have a dry season and a wet season. When there’s a drought, hippo populations can crash, a lot of mortality, both of adults and absolutely of juveniles because of either not enough water or not enough resources.

What we also see for hippo populations, which is what makes a lot of us optimistic for a future for hippos, is that they respond very well to good conditions. When there’s a lot of rain and a lot of water, we see hippo populations flourish and really grow and expand and increase very quickly, and that’s certainly what they seem to have in Colombia.

One thing that I think is interesting in Colombia is I think they’re spending a lot more time out of the water than hippos do in Africa, in part because the climate, it’s humid, it’s much more forgiving for a hippo. They have pretty sensitive skin, which is funny to say because they also are known to have some of the thickest skin, but there’s some sensitivity around them. Without water, they will die, or moisture, but I think they have that. And so maybe that’s another reason that people are really connecting to them is they can see them so much more than you can in the African context.

Klimek: Many places, non-native animal populations have been controlled by introducing predator species. Why would that not work here?

Lewison: I just don’t know what you’d introduce. The largest predator to the hippo, the most pervasive threat from predation for hippos is people. It is true that in Africa, lions, they will hunt younger hippos, smaller hippos. I don’t think we want to introduce African lions to Colombia. They certainly have their own carnivores, but it’s just not going to happen. There just isn’t anything bigger. Dinosaurs? We’ve all seen that movie, so we know how that goes.

We don’t have an option here of going up the food chain. Their skin is that thick. Save with a gun, they’re pretty hard to kill, and I don’t think there’s going to be a strategy to introduce anything that’s big enough to get them. And honestly, predation just doesn’t have a big impact even in African settings. It’s really the environment that controls hippo populations.

Klimek: How do you feel about the possibility of culling these hippos? Should that be considered as a potential solution?

Lewison: It’s a tough question, again, because of how I think folks in the area have really identified with the hippos, absolutely are concerned about animal welfare, and I obviously take all of that very seriously as well. I just don’t think at this point there’s any really good solutions. The good solution needed to come in 1993, and we’re way beyond that. So now the situation where we are, the fork in the road, I do think that this approach makes sense.

I honestly do worry about the potential of hippo-human conflict. I’ve spent a lot of time with hippos. I don’t find them to be particularly aggressive, but in areas where they are constantly under pressure, the analogy I typically use, the first time someone, if they break into your house, you’re surprised. By time ten, if someone breaks into your house, you’re ready to attack. And I think that’s where we see a lot of hippo-human conflict that have led to human fatalities.

Typically, I’m one of the people that when there is an attack that people call and say, “What can you tell us? What should we do?” And in the African settings, I think I wouldn’t get in a boat, in a canoe. I’m not interested in those trips because I am the person who hears about all of them that go south. I feel differently about being on land around hippos, but in the water in particular, there’s not much you can do. If a hippo is under threat and they’re coming for you, that’s not the time to be saying, “Well, what could I have done differently in this situation?”

But yeah, there really aren’t any easy answers here in terms of protecting people, which I think is the most at the top of the list. Of course, protecting hippos, but I would put in front of that even protecting the native plants and animals. This is their national treasure and something that I know they want to protect.

Klimek: So taking into account everything you’ve been saying about how this is a complex problem and none of the potential solutions are particularly good, what would be your recommendation as to how to balance human needs and wildlife needs?

Lewison: I think we’re on the path. The folks that I’ve talked to and heard from are trying to be thoughtful to all of the sides, to the people who feel connected to the animals, obviously to the animals themselves and their welfare, but also to the native plants and animals. And I think we are now hopefully moving toward the place of making this somewhat more sustainable. Of course, I have those fears of potential conflict if the population does grow. You hear stories of people getting gored by bison in Yellowstone. That’s because people do dumb things around wild animals. And even though these are animals that are not from here, they are still wild.

What I always want people to understand is the place where hippos are from is Africa, and the place where they really need desperate attention and support and conservation action is Africa, because while they’re thriving in Colombia, they are not thriving in the land where they have evolved. And that’s where I spend most of my time, is really trying to get organizations and governments and agencies to collaborate and coordinate so we can come up with sustainable conservation plans that absolutely protect people and their livelihoods and hippos and their ability to persist into the future.

I love that there’s a whole new group of people who didn’t even know about hippos, had never even thought about them, and now care about them, and I just hope that that extends to caring about hippos where they’re from.

Klimek: Rebecca Lewison is a conservation ecologist and professor at San Diego State University. She’s the director of SDSU’s Institute for Ecological Management and Monitoring. Thank you, Rebecca. This has been a fascinating talk.

Lewison: Great to talk with you, Chris. Thanks so much.


Klimek: To read Josh Hammer’s reporting about the Colombian hippos, go to SmithsonianMag.com. We’ll put a link to it in our show notes along with links to some of Lewison’s work. This week’s dinner party fact goes back to a time and place where hippos were presented as a potential solution to a problem rather than the cause of one—equally shocking, though.

Donny Bajohr: Hey, everyone. I’m Donny Bajohr, one of three photo editors here at the magazine, and I have a tasty treat for you for this episode’s dinner party fact. In the early 20th century, America had a problem—actually, two problems. They had a meat shortage and they had an invasive species in the South, the hyacinth. So Congressman Robert Broussard brought a bill to the House to solve both problems with one animal: the hippo. He wanted to bring over the hippo to eat up some hyacinth and feed Americans. Congressman Broussard’s bill didn’t pass, but it’s too bad, because I would love to hang a fang in some hippo meat.

Klimek (laughing): “Hang a fang!” Did you just come up with that?

Bajohr: You never heard that phrase?

Klimek: No. “Hang a fang.” I love it.

Klimek: “There’s More to That” is a production of Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions. From the magazine, our team is me, Debra Rosenberg and Brian Wolly. From PRX, our team is Jessica Miller, Genevieve Sponsler, Adriana Rozas Rivera, Ry Dorsey and Edwin Ochoa. The executive producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales. Our episode artwork is by Emily Lankiewicz. Fact-checking by Stephanie Abramson. Our music is from APM Music.

I’m Chris Klimek. Thank you for listening.

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Don’t Think Too Hard About Gum

When you chew gum, you’re essentially gnawing on plastic.

At the turn of the 20th century, William Wrigley Jr. was bent on building an empire of gum, and as part of his extensive hustle, he managed to persuade the U.S. Department of War to include his products in soldiers’ rations. His argument—baseless at the time—was that chewing gum had miraculous abilities to quench thirst, stave off hunger, and dissipate nervous tension. But he was right: Scientists have since found that gum chewing can indeed increase concentration, reduce the impulse to snack, alleviate thirst, and improve oral health.Perhaps that’s why people around the world have had the impulse to gnaw on tacky materials—roots, resins, twigs, blubber, tar made by burning birch bark—for at least 8,000 years. Today, gum is again being marketed as a panacea for wellness. You can buy gum designed to deliver energy, nutrition, stress relief, or joint health; scientists are even developing gums that can protect against influenza, herpes, and COVID. Ironically, this new era of chewing gum is manufactured with a distinctly modern ingredient, one not usually associated with wellness: plastic.By the time Wrigley began his business venture, Americans had grown accustomed to chewing gum sold as candy-coated balls or packaged sticks. The base of these chewing gums was made from natural substances such as spruce resin and chicle, a natural latex that Aztecs and Mayans chewed for hundreds if not thousands of years. Unfortunately for 20th-century Americans, the chicozapote trees that exude chicle take a long time to grow, and if they are overtapped, they die. Plus, cultivated trees don’t produce nearly as much chicle as wild trees, says Jennifer Mathews, an anthropology professor at Trinity University and the author of Chicle. In the 1950s, chicle harvesters began struggling to meet demand. So gum companies turned to the newest innovations in materials science: synthetic rubbers and plastics.Today, most companies’ gum base is a proprietary blend of synthetic and natural ingredients: If a packet lists “gum base” as an ingredient, that gum most likely contains synthetic polymers. The FDA allows gum base to contain any of dozens of approved food-grade materials—substances deemed either safe for human consumption or safe to be in contact with food. Many, though, are not substances that people would otherwise think to put in their mouth. They include polyethylene (the most common type of plastic, used in plastic bags and milk jugs), polyvinyl acetate (a plastic also found in glue), and styrene-butadiene rubber (commonly used in car tires). The typical gum base contains two to four types of synthetic plastics or rubbers, Gwendolyn Graff, a confectionery consultant, told me.Everything we love about gum today is thanks to synthetic polymers, Graff said. Polyvinyl acetate, for example, strengthens the bubble film. “If you blow a bubble, and it starts to get holes in it and deflate, that’s usually an indicator that it doesn’t have polyvinyl acetate,” Graff said. Styrene-butadiene rubber creates a bouncy chewiness that makes gum more likely to stick to itself rather than to surfaces like your teeth. Polyethylene can be used to soften gum so it doesn’t tire out your jaw. Gums with only natural polymers “can feel like they're going to fall apart in your mouth,” Graff said.Plastic gum, though, also falls apart, in a way: Gum chewing has been linked to microplastic ingestion. In a study published in December, U.K. researchers had a volunteer chew on a piece of gum for an hour, spitting into test tubes as they went. After an hour of gum chewing, the saliva collected contained more than 250,000 pieces of micro and nano plastics—comparable to the level of microplastics found in a liter of bottled water. In a study presented at a recent meeting of the American Chemical Society (which has not yet been peer-reviewed), a graduate student’s saliva contained elevated microplastic levels after she chewed several commercially available gums, including natural ones. The research on gum chewing and microplastics is still limited—these two papers effectively represent analysis of just two people’s post-chew saliva—but gum chewing has also been correlated with higher urine levels of phthalates, plastic-softening chemicals that are known endocrine disruptors.Scientists are still learning about the health impacts of microplastic ingestion, too. Microplastics find their way into all kinds of foods from packaging or contamination during manufacturing, or because the plants and animals we eat absorb and ingest microplastics themselves. As a result, microplastics have been found in human livers, kidneys, brains, lungs, intestines, placentas, and breast milk, but exactly how our bodies absorb, disperse, and excrete ingested plastic is not very well studied, says Marcus Garcia, who researches the health effects of environmental contaminants at the University of New Mexico. Some research in mice and cultured cells hint that microplastics have the potential to cause damage, and epidemiological research suggests that microplastics are associated with respiratory, digestive, and reproductive issues, as well as colon and lung cancer. But scientists are still trying to understand whether or how microplastics cause disease, which microplastics are most dangerous to human health, and how much microplastic the body can take before seeing any negative effects.The answer could affect the future of what we choose to eat—or chew. Ingesting tiny plastic particles might seem inevitable, but over the past 10 years or so, Americans have grown understandably fearful about bits of plastic making their way into our food, fretting about microwaving food in plastic containers and drinking from plastic bottles. Gum has, for the most part, not triggered those worries, but in recent years, its popularity had been dropping for other reasons. In a bid to reverse that trend, gum companies are marketing synthetic gum as a tool for wellness. Just like Wrigley, they are betting that Americans will believe in the power of gum to soothe nerves and heal ailments, and that they won’t think too hard about what modern gum really is. For anyone worried about swallowing still more plastic, after all, gum is easy enough to avoid.

A marine biologist discovered something incredible in a beer bottle on the seafloor

This story was produced in collaboration with The Dodo. One morning this week, Hanna Koch was snorkeling in the Florida Keys when she came across a brown beer bottle on the sea floor. Koch, a marine biologist for Florida’s Monroe County, picked up the bottle, planning to carry it with her and later toss it […]

This story was produced in collaboration with The Dodo. One morning this week, Hanna Koch was snorkeling in the Florida Keys when she came across a brown beer bottle on the sea floor. Koch, a marine biologist for Florida’s Monroe County, picked up the bottle, planning to carry it with her and later toss it out.  Through her dive mask, Koch peered inside to make sure it was empty.  That’s when she saw an eyeball.  “There was something staring back at me,” Koch told me.  It wasn’t just one eyeball, actually — but dozens. Inside the bottle was an octopus mom with a brood of babies. “You could see their eyes, you could see their tentacles,” Koch said in a recent interview with Vox and The Dodo. “They were fully formed.” Instead of taking the bottle with her and throwing it away like she initially intended, Koch handed it to her colleague, another marine biologist, who carefully placed it back on the sandy sea floor. Based on the images and video, Chelsea Bennice, a marine biologist at Florida Atlantic University, said the animal was likely a species of pygmy octopus — making this whole encounter even cuter.  On one hand, it’s hopeful to find life — an octopus family! — living in rubbish. “One man’s trash is another octopuse’s nursery,” as University of Miami environmental scientist Jennifer Jacquet told me when I showed her the photos. Her graduate student, Janelle Kaz, said it’s actually not uncommon for octopuses to take up residence in beer bottles. “They are highly curious and opportunistic,” Jacquet said.  But it’s also a reminder that, as Florida ecosystems decline, there are fewer and fewer places for wildlife to live. Overfishing, pollution, and climate change have devastated near-shore habitats in the Keys — and especially coral reefs — in the last few decades.  The irony, Koch told me, is that she runs a state-funded project in Monroe County to create “artificial reefs:” structures, often made of concrete, to enhance the habitat for fish, lobsters, and other sea creatures. And she was actually snorkeling that morning to figure out where to put some of the structures.  “This octopus found artificial habitat to make its home,” Koch said. “I was just like, ‘Wait momma, because I’m going to put out some better habitat for you — something that someone can’t pick up and throw away.’”

Sea Lion Bites Surfer Amid One of the Worst Outbreaks of Domoic Acid Poisoning That California Wildlife Rescuers Can Remember

Sea lions, dolphins and birds are sick and dying because of a toxic algae bloom in Southern California—and animal care organizations are overwhelmed by the scale

Volunteers with the Channel Islands Marine & Wildlife Institute in Santa Barbara, California, rescue a sick sea lion that's likely suffering from domoic acid poisoning. David Swanson / AFP via Getty Images It started as a normal surf session for RJ LaMendola. He was roughly 150 yards from the beach in Southern California, riding the waves and enjoying the peaceful solitude. But the situation quickly turned violent when a sea lion emerged from the water and charged at LaMendola. The 20-year surfing veteran tried to remain calm as he frantically paddled back to shore, but the sea lion was behaving unusually—“like some deranged predator,” LaMendola wrote in a widely shared post on Facebook. The sea lion made contact, delivering a hard bite on LaMendola’s left buttock that pierced through his wetsuit. “Never have I had one charge me, especially at that ferocity, mouth open,” LaMendola tells the Ventura County Star’s Stacie N. Galang and Cheri Carlson. “It really was out of, like, a horror movie.” Eventually, LaMendola made it back to the sand and drove himself to a nearby emergency room. After being treated, he contacted local wildlife authorities. The most likely explanation for the sea lion’s abnormally aggressive behavior? The creature was probably suffering from domoic acid poisoning, which results from toxic algae blooms. Across Southern California, authorities are grappling with one of the worst outbreaks of domoic acid poisoning they’ve ever seen. Dozens of sea lions and dolphins have been affected by the condition in recent weeks, reports the Los Angeles Times’ Summer Lin. Birds are also turning up dead, according to the Los Angeles Daily News’ Erika I. Ritchie. At least 140 sick sea lions are being cared for at the Marine Mammal Care Center in San Pedro, per the Los Angeles Times, because they have a 50 to 65 percent chance of surviving if they receive treatment. Roughly another 45 are being cared for at the Pacific Marine Mammal Center in Laguna Beach, reports the Los Angeles Daily News. SeaWorld San Diego has rescued another 15 this year, reports KGTV’s Jane Kim. Other sea lions have been found dead on area beaches. “This morning, we had three calls within 30 minutes of daylight breaking,” Glenn Gray, CEO of the Pacific Marine Mammal Center, told the Los Angeles Daily News on March 18. “That’s the magnitude of it.” Members of the public are being urged to report any sick, distressed or dead animals they find on the beach. Beachgoers should also stay away from the animals and give them space. David Swanson / AFP via Getty Images Dozens of dolphins, meanwhile, are washing up dead or close to death on beaches. Veterinarians are euthanizing the dolphins, because they rarely survive domoic acid poisoning, per the Los Angeles Times. “It’s the only humane option,” says John Warner, CEO of the Marine Mammal Care Center, to the Westside Current’s Jamie Paige. “It’s an awful situation.” A similar outbreak occurred in 2023, killing more than 1,000 sea lions. But officials say this year is shaping up to be worse. The harmful algae bloom started roughly five weeks ago. During a bloom, environmental conditions cause microscopic phytoplankton to proliferate. Some species of phytoplankton produce domoic acid, which then accumulates in filter-feeding fish and shellfish. Marine mammals become sickened when they eat the affected fish and shellfish. (Humans can also get sick from eating contaminated fish, shellfish and crustaceans.) In marine mammals, symptoms of domoic acid poisoning include seizures, lethargy, foaming at the mouth and a neck-craning behavior known as “stargazing.” Biting incidents—like the one LaMendola endured—are rare, but sickened animals have been known to behave aggressively. “The neurotoxin is crippling and killing sea lions and dolphins,” says Ruth Dover, managing director of the nonprofit Channel Islands Marine & Wildlife Institute, to the Ventura County Star. The bloom likely started when cold water from deep in the Pacific Ocean rose to the surface in February. Now, it also appears to be spreading closer to the shore. Researchers are monitoring the bloom, but so far, they have no indication of how long it will last. Authorities say toxic algae blooms are getting worse and happening more frequently because of climate change, agricultural runoff and other human-caused factors. This is the fourth straight year a domoic acid-producing bloom has developed off Southern California, as Dave Bader, chief operating officer of the Marine Mammal Care Center, tells KNX News’ Karen Adams. “We don’t know what the long-term impacts will be for having so many consecutive years of this toxic bloom,” Bader adds. “But [dolphins are] a sentinel species. They’re telling us about the health of the ocean, and when we see marine life dying, and we’re seeing it in increasing levels with more frequency, the ocean’s telling us something’s off.” The ongoing outbreak is taking its toll on Southern California veterinarians, volunteers and beachgoers. The incidents are particularly heartbreaking for lifeguards, who typically comfort dying dolphins—and keep beachgoers away—until authorities can arrive. Members of the public are encouraged to report any distressed, sick or dead animals they find on the beach. And, more importantly, they should leave the animals alone. Authorities say pushing a sick creature back into the ocean will likely cause it to drown. Dolphins also become especially agitated when they’re out of the water and people are around—to the point that they can die from fear. “People need to leave them alone and not crowd around them,” Warner tells the Los Angeles Times. “Selfies kill animals, so use your zoom, and stay away.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

Deep Sea Mining Impacts Still Felt Forty Years On, Study Shows

By David StanwaySINGAPORE (Reuters) - A strip of the Pacific Ocean seabed that was mined for metals more than 40 years ago has still not recovered,...

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - A strip of the Pacific Ocean seabed that was mined for metals more than 40 years ago has still not recovered, scientists said late on Wednesday, adding weight to calls for a moratorium on all deep sea mining activity during U.N.-led talks this week.A 2023 expedition to the mineral-rich Clarion Clipperton Zone by a team of scientists led by Britain's National Oceanography Centre found that the impacts of a 1979 test mining experiment were still being felt on the seafloor, a complex ecosystem hosting hundreds of species.The collection of small "polymetallic nodules" from an eight-metre strip of the seabed caused long-term sediment changes and reduced the populations of many of the larger organisms living there, though some smaller, more mobile creatures have recovered, according to the study, published in Nature journal."The evidence provided by this study is critical for understanding potential long-term impacts," said NOC expedition leader Daniel Jones. "Although we saw some areas with little or no recovery, some animal groups were showing the first signs of recolonisation and repopulation."Delegations from 36 countries are attending a council meeting of the U.N.'s International Seabed Authority in Kingston, Jamaica this week to decide whether mining companies should be allowed to extract metals like copper or cobalt from the ocean floor.As they deliberate over hundreds of proposed amendments to a 256-page draft mining code, environmental groups have called for mining activities to be halted, a move supported by 32 governments and 63 large companies and financial institutions."This latest evidence makes it even more clear why governments must act now to stop deep sea mining before it ever starts," said Greenpeace campaigner Louise Casson.While few expect a final text to be completed by the time the latest round of talks ends on March 28, Canada's The Metals Company plans to submit the first formal mining application in June.On Friday, delegates will discuss what actions should be taken if an application to mine is submitted before the regulations have been completed.TMC said at a briefing last week that it had a legal right to submit an application at any time and hoped that the ISA would bring clarity to the application process.TMC says the environmental impact of deep sea mining is significantly smaller than conventional terrestrial mining."You just have to move a lot less material to get the same amount of metal - higher grade means better economics, but also means lower environmental impacts," said Craig Shesky, TMC's chief financial officer.(Reporting by David Stanway; Editing by Saad Sayeed)Copyright 2025 Thomson Reuters.

In the hills of Italy, wolves returned from the brink. Then the poisonings began

Strict laws saved the country’s wolves from extinction. Now conservationists believe their relaxation could embolden vigilantesHigh on a mountain pass near the town of Cocullo in central Italy lay six black sacks. Inside were nine wolves, including a pregnant female and seven youngsters – an entire pack. They had eaten slabs of poisoned veal left out a few days earlier, dying over the hours that followed, snarls of pain fixed on their faces.Three griffon vultures and two ravens were also killed, probably alongside more animals that went into hiding, dying out of sight. Poison creates a succession of death, spreading through entire food chains and contaminating land and water for years. Continue reading...

High on a mountain pass near the town of Cocullo in central Italy lay six black sacks. Inside were nine wolves, including a pregnant female and seven youngsters – an entire pack. They had eaten slabs of poisoned veal left out a few days earlier, dying over the hours that followed, snarls of pain fixed on their faces.Three griffon vultures and two ravens were also killed, probably alongside more animals that went into hiding, dying out of sight. Poison creates a succession of death, spreading through entire food chains and contaminating land and water for years.The incident in 2023, was described as “culturally medieval” by national park authorities. “It was a bad day for the whole team,” says Nicolò Borgianni, a vulture field officer with Rewilding Apennines, who still remembers what a beautiful May day it was when the animals perished: alpine flowers poking through the grass and snow still dusting mountain peaks on the horizon from the 1,300-metre viewpoint. “But there are many cases like this one.”The bags containing nine wolves poisoned in Cocullo. No one was prosecuted for the deaths. Photograph: HandoutLike all poisoning events in this area, no one was prosecuted. The corpses were disposed of and life moved on. Now the ground is grubbed up from wild boars digging their snouts in the dirt looking for bulbs to eat.Downgrading wolf protection is a misguided decision. It offers no real help to rural communitiesIn the 1970s, wolves were on the brink of extinction in Italy, but thanks to strict protections and conservation efforts, there are now more than 3,000 of them. In many areas of Europe, farmers are having to learn to live alongside wolves again as they return to places they have been absent from for hundreds of years – and many are concerned that they prey on livestock. The story unfolding in this small valley in Italy is being repeated all over Europe. “Farmers feel abandoned by government, so they solve their problems on their own,” says Borgianni.From March 2025, the EU is relaxing its protections from “strictly protected” to “protected”, which means if wolves are perceived as a threat to rural communities, states can organise culls. Poisonings such as the one in Cocullo will remain illegal, but conservationists fear the relaxation of protections will empower vigilantes.Angela Tavone, a communications manager from Rewilding Apennines, is worried this will create more “chains of death” like the one two years ago. “Groups of farmers can feel more free to act against wolves because of the change in the EU law,” she says.Angela Tavone and Nicolò Borgianni inspect a horse skull. Photograph: Luigi Filice/The GuardianWhoever killed the wolf pack in 2023 failed to keep wolves away. Months later, another pack moved in. Nearly two years later, on that same spot, there are half a dozen wolf droppings, some just a few weeks old. The pack’s territory overlaps with mountain pastures used for cattle and sheep in spring and summer. Wild boar makes up most of the wolves’ diet here, but you can also spot hairs from cows or horses in the droppings. Borgianni estimates about 10% of their diet is livestock. One pack monitored by scientists in the region appeared to be eating closer to 70% during winter.Vultures are often the sentinels of a poisoning event. The Apennines has the highest number of GPS-tagged vultures in a single population, so observers know something is wrong if their tags stop moving. “If you investigate, you find these incidents,” says Borgianni. They are social animals and up to 60 birds can feed on a single carcass, so dozens can be wiped out quickly. Since 2021 the Rewilding Apennines team has picked up 85 carcasses across all species.An Apennine wolf pup carrying part of a red deer in Abruzzo, Italy. One poisoning event can kill a whole pack. Photograph: Nature Picture Library/AlamyPredator poisoning is an issue across Europe – and the world – but we know little about the extent of it, because animals generally die out of sight. Farmers say these apex predators threaten their livelihoods – and resolving the conflicts is complex.Down in the valley, Cristian Guido’s family farm and restaurant Il Castellaccio back on to fresh mountain pastures. Twenty years ago, when he started farming, there were not many wolves around. Two nights ago, CCTV cameras captured a pair of wolves wandering through the yard. Guido can sometimes hear them howling from the woods by the farm.Cristian Guido at his family farm and restaurant. Photograph: Luigi Filice/The GuardianFrom May, his 90 sheep go up into the hills every day to fatten on the succulent grasses, and come down in the evenings. One day last October, 18 of them didn’t come back. Guido believes wolves were to blame, perhaps chasing the sheep off a cliff.I find wolves beautiful, but I keep asking for help. It is just not possible to keep them awayThere was no evidence they had been killed by a wolf (there often is not) so he got no compensation. Now, when he takes his animals up in the morning, he doesn’t know if they will all come back. “I fear that will happen again,” he says.He is not alone. “Other farms suffered the same loss,” he says. In the past few years, half a dozen dead wolves have been hung up by roads and bus stops by people protesting at their return.“I find wolves beautiful, but I keep asking for help. It is just not possible to keep them away. And I’m aware if you shoot them, you will get more and more damage,” he says. Guido believes protections for wolves should not have been downgraded, but that farmers must be given more support.The bones of a horse in ⁨Cocullo⁩, ⁨Abruzzo. Photograph: Luigi Filice/The GuardianThis would include making compensation easier to claim and quicker to be distributed. There should be more support for farmers constructing wolf-proof fences near their properties, he believes.Research this year looking at wolf-farmer conflicts in northern Greece found wolves were often scapegoats for deep-rooted issues, such as financial challenges, poor government policies on protection of livelihoods, a changing climate, lack of services and rural depopulation. “Our findings emphasise that while wolves impact farmers, economic and policy-related factors play a greater role,” the researchers concluded. The study found fair compensation schemes were essential for coexistence.These findings are echoed by a coalition of NGOs, including BirdLife Europe, ClientEarth and the European Environmental Bureau, which say that instead of providing support for farmers living alongside wolves, the EU has allowed them to be culled. “Downgrading wolf protection is a misguided decision that prioritises political gains over science and will further polarise the debate,” say the NGOs. “It offers no real help to rural communities.”Virginia Sciore is a farmer with 150 goats grazing on pastures in the Morrone mountains. Since 2018 she has lost five goats. “You can see in the eyes of the goats they are terrified – something happened in the mountain,” she says. Sometimes, she finds a collar or tuft of hair, but usually they disappear without a trace, so she doesn’t claim compensation. “I don’t know if it was a wolf,” she says.“The majority of farmers don’t believe in coexistence,” Sciore says. “They have stories about wolves that have been imported. They want to believe these things. People are angry and it’s projected on to the wolf.”Virginia Sciore has lost five of her 150 goats since 2018. Photograph: Angela Tavone/Rewilding ApenninesThe conflict over wolves comes amid a wider shift away from environmental protections across Europe. Last year, EU leaders scaled back plans to cut pollution and protect habitats after angry protests from farmers, as a law to restore nature was turned into a political punching bag. “It’s a low moment historically to face this issue,” says Tavone.The Cucollo incident was a turning point for the Rewilding Apennines team. In response, they created their first anti-poison dog unit. A malinois dog called Wild – who at six months old is still in training – will, in the coming months, sniff out potential poisoning incidents.As spring approaches, so too does the most dangerous time for poisoning events, as farmers look to protect young and vulnerable livestock. Catching poisoning incidents quickly is key – and Wild will help with that. Those fighting to protect wildlife are increasing their efforts. “The war is still going on,” says Tavone.The mountains around Cocullo⁩. As spring approaches, poisoning events usually spike as farmers try to protect young animals. Photograph: Luigi Filice/The Guardian

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