Weed management – Millennial Matriarchs

February 15 is marked as Hippo Day.

And come to think of it, why not? After all, hippos are the third largest land animals on Earth (after elephants white rhinos). Males can measure around 3.5m long and stand 1.5m tall, and weigh in at up to 3,200kg. That’s a weighty reason to allocate a day for them!

On Hippo Day, here is an interesting story.

A hippo can eat up to 35kg of grass in one night. And it is this ability to munch down herbage in quantities, and their very bulk, that led to a strange development in the US in the 1910s. Senator Robert F. Broussard, who represented Louisiana, brought a House Resolution for large-scale import of hippos to the US. No, not as a curiosity or to keep in zoos. But to solve two problems that America was facing at that time.

The first was the widespread proliferation of water hyacinth. First brought in as an ornamental water plant from the Amazon, the hyacinth spread madly, and within two decades, had overtaken waterways across the South of the US, threatening water trade routes. Several ways to get rid of the weed were tried—from breaking plants up, to dredging them, to setting them on fire. But nothing stopped the weed.

The second problem was the steeply rising prices of meat, making it unaffordable for many. The fundamental reason is not clear—it could have been the rising prices of grain, cattle shortages or profiteering by meatpacking companies. Or a combination of all of these. But there were people in the US who seriously feared that they would be forced into vegetarianism which they saw as a disaster. (It was a different time, wasn’t it?)

Senator Broussard and some friends came up with the completely out-of-the-box and bizarre idea of importing hippos to solve this twin crisis. Their claim was that the hippos would happily chomp their way through the hyacinths. And that their flesh would be a great source of meat and protein for the Americans!

And so they moved the “American Hippo Bill” in 1910! Ex-President Teddy Roosevelt was among its supporters.

The House Committee before which the Bill was presented asked some very sensible basic questions: Could hippos be domesticated? Could they be contained? Would they eat the water hyacinth? Is their meat edible? Broussard and his colleagues answered with a resounding ‘yes’ to all the questions.

But the answers, we know today, are ‘No’ in each and every case. Hippos are not domesticable. They are known to kill about 500 people every year. They are extremely strong and heavy, and it would be almost impossible to contain them with even the strongest fences. And they are very unlikely to have made water hyacinth a serious part of their diet. They feed mainly on grasses and would not have taken to this weed which is very low in nutritive value. And though hippo meat is eaten, it is not widely consumed.

There would have been other serious negative ecological impacts of introducing hippos into the waterways too—their heavy treading in water bodies would stir up the mud, and their poop would add to the organic load in the water, and would completely disturb the dynamics and lead to algal blooms and other problems.

Fortunately sense prevailed in the House Committee and they vetoed the Bill. Else, who knows what the American landscape would be like today!

And now for some Hippo Trivia to celebrate Hippo Day

We think of hippos as African animals, but nearly 5.9 million to 9,000 years ago, India was home to the hippopotamus. These entered Eurasia from Africa, and later diversified into South Asia before going extinct.

They can hold their breath and walk under water for up to 5 minutes.

Hippos may look bulky, but they are quite athletic, and run at speeds of up to 30kmph!

A group of hippos is called a bloat. Other terms for a hippo group include thunder, herd, sea, school, pod, dale, crash, and siege.

Happy Hippo Day!

–Meena

Tag: Weed management

Hippo Day is a Thing!