Hippos have become an invasive species in Colombia | Hacker News Reader

Hippos have become an invasive species in Colombia

cnet.com

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I’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.

I 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?

It’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.

Really? 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.

When 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.

Upvoted you, mainly because you echoed my own sentiments about the hippos perfectly. Ever since I first heard about this I thought it was more fascinatingly delightful than anything unfortunate, and in terms of damage, nature itself is full of species collisions, so this is hardly the sky falling. It's also absurdly amusing that the ferociously bloody crime giant Pablo Escobar's single most enduring, still growing material legacy has been this of all things: the small herd of hippos he decided to import one day as a casual, probably barely considered gesture of showing off his wealth.

>Maybe our goal shouldn’t be to keep ecosystems static.

I'm not sure who's goal this is. Can you elaborate on this? Who says this?

AFAIK, the ecological preservation argument is against human changes, to allow the ecosystem to evolve on its own, not to keep it static.

"Leave No Trace" if you will.

> I'm not sure who's goal this is. Can you elaborate on this? Who says this?

You cant stop physics so "static" can be interpreted to mean "mainain" over an arbitrary amount of time...although I am not sure why you have focused on to that term.

Leaving aside the troublesome reality of humans being part of the global ecosystem, any forest/wildlife/etc preserve is implicitly maintaining a localized ecosystem over multiple human generations.

Agreed. "Inheritors of the Earth" by Chris Thomas is an entire book on this subject.

I half agree with you. Ecosystems are not static but we should try to mitigate the human impact. At the same time, we shouldn't spend so much fighting against this. For example, we should move away from flood prone areas rather than build higher and higher levees. Fighting against nature.

Hippos are also rather dangerous animals. In Africa, they kill and injure more people than lions do.

But 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.

There's only 80. Surely it would be trivial to just shoot them?

The 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-ab...

HN actually discussed neutering hippos seven years ago in "Why It's Nearly Impossible to Castrate a Hippo": 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

And finally there's the infamous plan to raise hippos in Louisiana: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11321495

I guess we like our hippos.

interesting! 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.

A 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.

How about implanting something that releases birth control for 1-2 years?

It’s actually not that hard to chemically castrate both males and females.

> The public is against shooting them

Governments worldwide make hugely unpopular decisions all the time, and often against the interest or will of the majority. It's strange that for something as trivial officials would take precautions.

Well, if we're going along these lines, it also offers the government (officials) no direct benefits to shoot the hippos, so they get to pass the buck off onto the public while saving themselves the trouble.

They probably don't care because it's not bothering the public yet. Just wait until there are thousands of hippos and they're a nuisance or people are getting killed. Then the public will be crying about the government doing nothing about this looming problem.

That's ridiculous actually. don't they euthanize stray dogs in Colombia?

I think when it comes to this kind of issues we have to weight of coises. Yes, killing hippos is kind of sad, but also is losing others species because of them. And in the scale, native species should be given priority.

You don`t have to shoot all of them. Just allow hunters to kill like 50 of them, and with the money from the licenses, capture other 30 or so and send them to zoos or back to africa in their native enviroment.

What about tranqulizing them and moving the specimens to an area where they're native? That wouldn't harm them and would solve the problem. Might not even be as costly as neutering them, I suppose.

That means moving them to another continent. Who will pay for that?

I mean yeah. I'm sure there are even people who would pay a lot of money for the opportunity to go hippo hunting.

Damn do they reproduce fast! The last time I read about the hippos, those keeping count weren't exactly sure but the estimate was around 30 to 40... Now 80?

there could have just been more discovery, not more reproduction.

But I know nothing about hippo reproduction, so my guess is as good as yours!

Sell hippo tags. Hunters will pay you to solve the problem.

There 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-fera...

It 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.

I hope you're joking. What's good in removing species from their natural habitat? This could create a massive imbalances in any ecosystem.

The hippos in this case are an invasive species and already damaging the ecosystem.

One could argue humans are the invasive species.

That seems like another topic / doesn't change the status of those hippos.

On the other hand, they are under threat in Africa. A thriving population on another continent would be a net positive.

Not for the local ecosystem.

The Bering Land Bridge was an ecological crime and someone ought to go to jail for it!

But what sentence would be reasonable? 25k to life?

Given that humans crossed it, resulting in the extinction of the majority of megafauna in the Americas... yes?

The Clovis people are long gone, and prosecuting their descendants would be pointless and cruel. So I find myself agreeing with the first half of your sentence.

Look up cane toads in Australia is you want an example

I 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.

The 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.

There’s also a posh night club in Aspen, CO USA with his name on it...

Zebras are quite dangerous. It's interesting they let you get that close.

When 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.

sounds like they need more crocodiles to eat the hippos

crocodiles tend not to eat hippos.

Particularly not the smaller varieties that live in South America.

Now maybe if we import some saltwater crocs ...

An adult hippo can easily kill a croc.

Nothing eat Hippos, a healthy adult has no predators.

I guess only man and other hippos can kill a hippo.

they will eat youngsters. it will help stop the population exploding to get them before they get to adulthood

It 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://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/news/00000160-27a... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=003lqobeivY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS1rU5SAskU

"The Hippopotamus is one of the largest mammals on the African continent and although mature adults are much harder for predators to kill, they are still preyed up by a number of predators throughout the wetlands. Big cats such as Lions and other animals like Hyenas and Crocodiles are the most common predators of the Hippopotamus, particularly of the young or sick individuals. "

https://a-z-animals.com/animals/hippo/

this is elementary. not sure why i am getting downvoted

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