2023-08-06 18:38:51
In early June, the Digital Look reported that a lifting carried out by the Ministry of the Environment and Sustainable Development of Colombia points out that Pablo Escobar, one of the most notorious drug traffickers in the world, left a dangerous legacy for the country: the so-called “cocaine hippos”.
Why they are a threat: Colombian hippos are considered an invasive alien species. This designation is given to all organisms that are not native to the place where they were introduced. Generally, this process of insertion of non-native animals (or plants) tends to cause loss of biodiversity, being pointed out by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as the second cause of extinction of biological diversity.
Hippopotamus on the banks of the Magdalena River in Colombia. These animals, which are not native, were imported into the country by drug trafficker Pablo Escobar, multiplying wildly and representing a serious threat to local biodiversity. Credit: Guillermo Ossa – Shutterstock
Now, the Colombian government has announced that it will send dozens of these hippos to other countries. The remainder, as informed by the minister of the environment Susana Muhamad in a live transmitted in the last week, should be gradually sterilized or euthanized.
During the broadcast, the minister assured that her plan for population control and the transfer of hippos will be carried out ethically and following safety protocols. Through an agreement with India, 60 pachyderms will be taken to the country. Another 15 go to the Philippines and 10 to Mexico, totaling 85 “exported” animals.
As for sterilization, the minister informed that the procedure will be performed on 40 individuals per year at a cost of 40 million Colombian pesos, which is equivalent to approximately R$47 million.
Sterilization will begin in six months with 20 hippos. Our goal is to advance to 40 surgeries per year, which would lead us to contain the reproductive capacity of the population
Susana Muhamad, Minister of the Environment of Colombia
Regarding the extreme measure of euthanizing some of them, Susana said that this, if necessary, will be done in a restricted and safe way.
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Understand the case of Colombia’s “cocaine hippos”
It all started in 1981, when “El Patrón” illegally imported a male and three females of the species. Hippopotamus amphibius from a zoo in the USA and transferred them to Hacienda Nápoles, the famous residence of the international criminal located in the Colombian city of Doradal, in the Magdalena river valley.
The Colombian government is going to “export” 85 hippos descended from animals introduced into the country by Pablo Escobar in the 1980s. Credit: David Havel – Shutterstock
After Escobar’s death in 1993, the animals (which are the world’s most aggressive herbivores) were left to their own devices, breeding and dispersing into the surrounding areas, establishing a healthy population along the river. Now, however, the government census has revealed that there are around 215 hippos in the country – twice as many as originally expected. Scientists warn that the animals, living in relative safety due to the ban on hunting and the absence of predators, could reach 1,500 by 2035.
What’s more, the researchers found that about 37% of them are young, which indicates that reproduction is happening earlier and more often. These animals can breed for most of their lives, which is estimated to be between 40 and 50 years.
Researchers from the National University of Colombia, the Alexander von Humboldt Biological Resources Research Institute in Bogotá, and Cornare, the environmental agency that manages an area where hippos live, made great efforts to count the animals, generating a study accepted for publication. by the magazine Nature.
In addition to being dangerous to approach them, hippos are nocturnal beings, travel long distances and spend up to 16 hours submerged in water, making monitoring severely difficult.
Another point that aggravates the situation is that these animals have an enormous impact on the physical environment, destroying more than 50 kg of vegetation daily, for example, and threatening native species, such as the manatee (Trichechus manatus), the neotropical otter (Lontra longicaudis) and the capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris), which are victims of the voracious appetite of hippos.
The banks of rivers are also being severely eroded as they flow in and out of water – which is also suffering due to the exaggerated defecation of these animals.
Sterilizing hippos is expensive and time-consuming
Although hippos began to be sterilized by the government in 2011, very few of them have been treated, due to the costs and logistics of approaching them.
One strategy is to administer contraceptives to animals by dart. This can gradually eliminate hippos, preventing them from reproducing, but it’s a slow, expensive process that hasn’t been tested on a large scale before. It is estimated that the method could eradicate hippos in 45 years for no less than $850,000.
The slaughter option is controversial. When an aggressive male named Pepe was legally captured and killed in 2009, it sparked an outcry and eventually led to a hunting ban. Earlier this year, Minister Susana Muhamad promised to protect, not reduce, the hippopotamus population, which raised the alarm among researchers concerned about the country’s biodiversity.
“There is a moral weight to the decision to kill a hippopotamus,” said Rafael Moreno, an ecologist at the Humboldt Institute who was part of the study. “But the weight of the other decision – inaction – is much greater.”
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