7 ms·
Hippos have become an invasive species in Colombia
- cultofmetatron 7y agoI spent my birthday at his zoo in 2018. Fascinating place and I highly recommend going there for the history. Also you can get stupidly close to zebras and donkey zebra hybrids that roam the area.
- lowdose 7y agoThe revenge of Pablo living life at large. I bet he would have a big smile on his face if someone from the future told him this in 80's.
- elpakal 7y agoThere’s also a posh night club in Aspen, CO USA with his name on it...
- 0xcafecafe 7y agoZebras are quite dangerous. It's interesting they let you get that close.
- chantelles 7y agoWhen I was at Hacienda Napoles a few years ago the Zebras had escaped and three men were chasing them around calling them whores. It was _super_ fun. The zebras like many of the animals there have been in captivity for a long time. The zebras are a joke a bit because the government confiscated all his illegal zebra's, but instead gave them horses painted, so they represent his triumph over state power and why the sign/plane are all painted with the zebra stripes. I also fed Vanessa Pablo's pet hippo - petted her, fed her celery sticks and carrots. It's amazing place, when I was there Pablo's house was 40% torn down so it was fun to walk through what was left before it is gone. The city beside it - Doradal - is good to see too, and talk with locals at the football pitch about Pablo's history there. The hippo story emerges every 5-7 years as excellent clickbait/reminder of the order of things.
- foreigner 7y agoThere's only 80. Surely it would be trivial to just shoot them?
- yndoendo 7y agoThe Truth About Animals by Lucy Cooke (2018) talks about this issue. The public is against shooting them and it cost a poor country over $100,000 to just neuter one hippo. The issue keeps compounding since it takes less than half the time for a hippo to sexually mature in the resource rich land of Colombia versus their natural habbit. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/25/books/review/the-truth-about-animals-lucy-cooke.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/25/books/review/the-truth-ab...
- nealabq 7y agoHN actually discussed neutering hippos seven years ago in "Why It's Nearly Impossible to Castrate a Hippo": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6990822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6990822 And there's a post from 5 years ago called Pablo Escobar’s hippos: A growing problem. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8949017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8949017 And finally there's the infamous plan to raise hippos in Louisiana: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11321495 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11321495 I guess we like our hippos.
- dmix 7y agointeresting! It turns out the problem is the testes can retract up to 16 inches into the body and it's a difficult procedure. In fact it says its hard to tell genders apart because of the way their penis retracts so far. But the study of castrating 10 males work almost perfectly and they showed less aggression... in fact the females were more likely to bully and harass castrated males. So not all is lost but they are still a challenge.
- arnsholt 7y agoA very cool mashup of the Escobar hippos and the Louisiana plan is Sarah Gailey's American Hippo duo of short novels. In extremely brief: cowboys in the wild west, but on hippos on the Mississippi. Lots of fun, both books.
- RachelF 7y agoHippos are also rather dangerous animals. In Africa, they kill and injure more people than lions do.
- anbotero 7y agoBut don’t you think they are cool to see? Now people in Colombia can enjoy from these creatures without leaving their country, even...! Sure, now they have to deal with them, but now they can invest in containing them what they would spend for traveling...! PS: This is just a entrepreneur-minded parody to another post here.
- DraftDodger67 7y agoIt might make a lot of sense to airlift all kinds of species out of Africa and into other environments. With the population of the continent going to 4 billion by 2100, and with the massive levels of poaching and habitat destruction that will entail, the prospects for native flora and fauna there are not good.
- idiocratic 7y agoI hope you're joking. What's good in removing species from their natural habitat? This could create a massive imbalances in any ecosystem.
- duxup 7y agoThe hippos in this case are an invasive species and already damaging the ecosystem.
- eyko 7y agoOne could argue humans are the invasive species.
- duxup 7y agoThat seems like another topic / doesn't change the status of those hippos.
- HarryHirsch 7y agoOn the other hand, they are under threat in Africa. A thriving population on another continent would be a net positive.
- duxup 7y agoNot for the local ecosystem.
- hoseja 7y ago
- ptah 7y agosounds like they need more crocodiles to eat the hippos
- bryanrasmussen 7y agocrocodiles tend not to eat hippos.
- nkozyra 7y agoParticularly not the smaller varieties that live in South America. Now maybe if we import some saltwater crocs ...
- krtkush 7y agoAn adult hippo can easily kill a croc.
- cfontes 7y agoNothing eat Hippos, a healthy adult has no predators. I guess only man and other hippos can kill a hippo.
- ptah 7y agothey will eat youngsters. it will help stop the population exploding to get them before they get to adulthood
- leoc 7y agoIt seems (not an expert) that prides of lions will have a go if they're hungry enough. The result is a disturbing combination of violence and low-energy slapstick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ukv0DT08XHg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ukv0DT08XHg https://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/news/00000160-27ae-d993-ad70-bfffb59e0000 https://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/news/00000160-27a... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=003lqobeivY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=003lqobeivY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS1rU5SAskU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS1rU5SAskU
- ptah 7y ago
- mrfusion 7y agoI’m going to be downvoted but I think this is actually kind of cool. Just something that makes the world a little more interesting. Similar to wild horses living in chincoteaque. Sure the hippos harm some species but they may be helping other species. Life is about change. Maybe our goal shouldn’t be to keep ecosystems static.
- jaxn 7y agoI can appreciate your alternative viewpoint. I know we are not supposed to talk about downvotes, but I find it a little sad that HN has become predictively aggressive to dissenting views. In terms of technology and business, we are only starting to learn that we may be the new Pablo Escobar, creating large ecosystem changes that are hard or impossible to reverse for our own pleasure and gain. Disruptive change is inherently good for business efficiencies, content creation, information access, etc; Disruptive hippos are inherently bad?
- anbotero 7y agoIt’s say life should be more about harmony which yes, it can bring change. But change brought without consideration is just one force ruling indiscriminately over others, and that is bad.
- shadowprofile77 7y agoReally? Because nature itself, as a vast unconscious force of constant movement, brings forth gargantuan currents of rapid and slow change both, with absolutely no consideration of any kind for anything that's already the case. Yet things seem to balance out and learn to thrive in some way or another over time. We are no less a part of nature than any other productive and destructive thing it has created, I'd even say we're much less catastrophic than some others in fact. We only delude ourselves in thinking otherwise.
- anbotero 7y agoWhen I said consideration it was obviously referring to us as conscious beings. Still forest fires happen, species invade other spaces (people think it’s only human-triggered), and other things happen, but we can most of the time at least try to assess what it would mean for US to introduce such drastic changes. The only delusion is thinking it’s cool for Hippos to forcefully co-exist in another habitat different from where they came from.
- williesleg 7y agoThey're just taking back their territory from the Latino man. No big deal. Latino man is bad like white man. Women are good.
- Jamwinner 7y agoSell hippo tags. Hunters will pay you to solve the problem.
- dustincoates 7y agoThere was a recent Reply All episode about the feral hog problem in the US[0]. Something that stood out was that hunting in that case actually made things worse. Hunting feral hogs is really fun to a portion of the population, which creates an incentive to keep them around to continue hunting them. But they reproduce too quickly to do this responsibly. https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/n8hw3d/149-3050-feral-hogs https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/n8hw3d/149-3050-fera...