Pooping hippos create ‘community guts’ in African ponds

https://www.science.org/content/article/pooping-hippos-create-community-guts-african-ponds

by rbanffy • 5 years ago

94 36 5 years ago

xchaotic• 5 years ago

just don't tell Gwyneth Paltrow (https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/gwyneth-paltr...)

dsizzle• 5 years ago

I'm surprised an article on hippo poop altering the local environment doesn't mention the unique (and disgusting!) way that hippos poop: by spraying it everywhere propeller-style with their tails! The usual explanation for that is that it's to mark their territory, but I wonder if this offers a more cooperative explanation? (I would be skeptical of that explanation TBC.)

Thiez• 5 years ago

It may be disgusting, but it makes for a great effect when played in reverse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5SSnQBtaq4 :-)

hawk_• 5 years ago

what's with the blurring in that video?

1cvmask2• 5 years ago

That was so funny and clever.

samcheng• 5 years ago

It's a spectacular experience if you're lucky enough to see it at the zoo!

jonsen• 5 years ago

Out of luck if you wear glasses.

setgree• 5 years ago

This comes up in the movie Okja but I didn’t know it was based on a real thing

kevin_thibedeau• 5 years ago

That's when they do it on land. If you see underwater footage of them there's usually lots of brown grass bits floating around. That's hippo poop too.

SllX• 5 years ago

For a good time, check out any Casual Geographic video that mentions hippos on YouTube. I did not know they sprayed their fecal matter everywhere, but it fits my expectations of what to expect from a hippo.

rectang• 5 years ago

If swallowed by other hippos, the bacteria may possibly aid digestion and disease resistance.

Presumably it also aids in the spread of hippo-hosted parasites?

And yet apparently that cost doesn't outweigh the benefits of this behavior.

kadoban3• 5 years ago

The hippo isn't the only thing involved here though, the parasites and bacteria are too. So it may not be strictly best for the hippo, it may be best for something else that is able to influence the hippo.

Robotbeat• 5 years ago

It may mean development of pathogens that that hippo clan is resistant to but which rival hippo clans, or perhaps rival species, are not. Like “Guns, Germs, and Steel” but for hippos.

londons_explore• 5 years ago

Lots of behaviours of mammals seem to assist the propagation of parasites. For example sneezing seems to have very little biological need, yet is incredibly good at distribution of airborne pathogens.

The sneeze reflex is complex, and clearly not encoded in the very small and simple viruses that trigger it.

I have a hypothesis that many undiscovered pathogens in fact have a positive impact on survival rates of their host, which is why behaviours that deliberately spread (some) pathogens are so common.

heavyset_go2• 5 years ago

A sneeze is a like a cough in that its a mechanical way to expel blockage and foreign bodies from nasal mucous membranes that happen to be great environments for pathogens to grow.

culi2• 5 years ago

In general parasites that kill their hosts are failures. That's why every single human pandemic has come from zoonotic parasites. It's parasites that are not adapted to humans and accidentally kill them. Generally, given enough time, they would eventually adapt and the strains that are the least harmful (sometimes even most beneficial) would win out as their hosts would do better and allow the parasites to spread more

This happened in South America with a cholera outbreak. In countries with good sanitation, strains that made their hosts sicker ended up dying out because people had to stay indoors more. So the strains that were less sever allowed people to go out and interact socially and therefore spread the cholera further.

Arguably the same thing might be happening with the Omicron variant which early data suggests is much much milder than previous variants

silexia• 5 years ago

Fecal transplants in humans are purported to have a myriad of health benefits. I wonder if the clean water push may actually be harmful in some ways as people lose some diverse, healthy bacteria in our guts?

kadoban3• 5 years ago

As far as I know fecal transplants are only known to be beneficial in some cases, presumably when there is something seriously wrong with the recipient's gut biome. It doesn't seem clear to me that clean water is bad or fecal transplants are generally helpful.

Keep in mind that lack of clean water is a _huge_ killer. The benefits would have to be ridiculous for it to be worth it.

ng12• 5 years ago

Some chronic gastro issues like IBS and Crohn's are virtually unheard of in developing countries. There's a theory that this because people in developed countries have underdeveloped immune systems from underexposure to foodborne bacteria/viruses.

Net-net clean water is definitely more important but there's still some drawbacks.

culi2• 5 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis

In my native country there's a joke/saying that says that kids who ate their own shit as babies have good luck. So if someone tells you you have good luck, their making a joke about you being a shiteater lol.

I've always wondered if this might be rooted in the large number of observed health benefits associated with early childhood exposure to diverse microbiomes

DonHopkins• 5 years ago

Flanders and Swan's Hippopotamus Song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zpDF3Py7r8

Mud, mud, glorious mud, nothing quite like it for cooling the blood.

1cvmask2• 5 years ago

Humans display similar outcomes in the Ganges river. But it is dangerous for outside tourists for sure and it seems the locals are immune or inoculated to all the e. coli bacili in the river. The humans there believe the river to be purifying the soul and spirit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganges

https://www.indiatimes.com/news/india/fatal-bacteria-like-e-...

sjtindell• 5 years ago

When I visited Varanasi there were literally bodies and ashes being put in the river right upstream from thousands of people bathing, drinking, playing, and worshipping. Wild.

esgang• 5 years ago

I was traveling in Rishikesh and there was an enormous pilgrimage for people to visit a temple dedicated to Shiva. I learned of a number of fascinating traditions from the pilgrims.

One was to fill a water bottle with "Ganga Water" to splash onto some hanging fabric at the entrance of the temple.

On the 14km hike up the mountain to the temple I was invited to a chillum circle. As we sat around smoking and talking I saw one of the other people reach down and take a drink from the water bottles so many people had hanging from their belts.

I asked, "Is that... your Ganga water?"

They responded, "Yes! Would you like some?"

I said, "Thank you, but my body is unfamiliar with drinking Ganga Water. I think it will make me sick."

They replied, "Maybe you are already sick if you are unable to drink Ganga Water."

civilized• 5 years ago

The bacteria that live in our guts influence everything from nutrition to autism.

You might think an article in Science could manage to avoid a deeply misleading falsehood before completing its very first sentence.

Despite some statistical correlations and mouse studies, the idea that gut bacteria influence autism in humans is poorly supported. And recent studies suggest the influence may go in the other direction. [1]

Just keep in mind that "top" journals like Science, Nature, and PNAS have a tendency to publish flimsy ideas if the result is sensational. They are the tabloids of science and must be taken with a hefty pinch of salt.

[1] https://cosmosmagazine.com/health/body-and-mind/autism-gut-m...

ramraj07• 5 years ago

It's an active area of investigation, and you're right that there's yo-yoing. But note that the article discussed in your ref is published in Cell, the same journal that also published some of the original work it's refuting. As much as NatSciCell publish sensationalized work, high impact work pretty much universally gets published there still.

It's like the nytimes. Popular to crap on it, but in the end they still put out good journalism.

sxv• 5 years ago

This article pushes the animal-centric narrative, as though hippos are somehow controlling this process. It makes more sense to think of the bacteria as the dominant players in this ecosystem and the hippos (or their intestines and feces) as just one of the channels through which they propagate.

kadoban3• 5 years ago

I would think that it's a little of both, and probably a few other players that nobody really noticed yet.

abrie• 5 years ago

This article reminded me of a story I heard second hand. In the Karoo of South Africa, sheep farmers provided lambs with feed containing the ground up stomaches of older sheep who lived in the area. If this was not done, then the lambs would fail to thrive when grazing. Presumably the ingested intestines transmit bacteria conferring the ability to digest otherwise indigestible material.

FredPret• 5 years ago

I can tell you first hand that Karoo lamb is perfect. In decades of meat-eating all around the world, I’ve never encountered its equal.

Pooping hippos create ‘community guts’ in African ponds

Related Stories