Hippos
Hippo is short for hippopotamus.
Hippopotamus is Greek for 'water or river horse'. But hippos are not related to horses at all. Their closest living relatives may be pigs or whales and dolphins.
Hippos are heavy. A hippo is as heavy as 12 pigs!
Photo by Follow Alice is from Pexels and is in the public domain.
Hippos live in rivers and lakes in Africa. They go onto land to eat grass and fruit.
They are made for life in the water: their eyes, ears, and nostrils are on top of their head.
They can see, hear, and breathe while most of their body is underwater.
Hippos don't float or swim. They move around in the water by pushing off the bottom of the river with their feet. If you saw it underwater, it would look like the hippo was walking or running.
Hippos can hold their breath for up to 30 minutes.
Hippos need sun cream Hippos need to protect their skin from the hot sun, so they spend a lot of the day in the water. When they are out of the water, hippos ooze a thick, red goo out of their skin. It is called "blood sweat" but it is not blood. The red goo works like sun cream. |
A hippo's skull
Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Hippos have big, pointy tusks. They use their tusks to defend themselves against attackers.
A hippo may be killed by lions when they work as a team. But, as a hippo's tusks can hurt lions, lions like to hunt smaller animals.
Hippos are deadly The hippo is the most dangerous big land animal in Africa. Hippos kill more people each year than lions do. Hippos don't eat animals or people because they don't eat meat. Hippos kill because they get angry and want to fight when animals or people go near them. Hippos have the strongest bite of any mammal. |