whatilearned
Read more: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/72550/hippos-eat-way-more-meat-we-thought-and-it-can-make-them-sick
TIL That Hippos eat meat, and are not purely herbivores!
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They eat more people than lions do!
Look into obligate and facultative.
Obligate *must* have something in their diet or they will not thrive. For example cats are obligate carnivores; they either get meat or they starve.
Facultative can get nutrients from other things but to thrive still need a primary ingredient. Dogs are facultative carnivores; they need meat, but if they don’t have meat and only eat plants for a month it won’t starve them. (They won’t thrive, but they won’t die like a cat would.)
There aren’t too many animals out there that are purely herbavores. Most of the animals that we think of as herbavores simply don’t get the oportunity to eat meat very often because they’re not adapted to hunting.
I remember a story I heard once from a naturalist who was studying hippos, and saw one pause from causally browsing in the river to take a bite out of a passing gazelle. Hippos don’t mess around
Highly recommend reading about “opportunistic carnivores”. There’s a video of a deer eating a rabbit that got popular a couple weeks ago. Ooo and an elephant that killed like a dozen people after a villager killed its baby, and it was found with a non-zero amount of people in its stomach.
Runnnnnn!
Most animals eat whatever they can get, with few exceptions. Deer eat small rodents and fish when they can, for example
Hippos should never be messed with.
Scientists have observed hippos attacking, killing, and eating other animals, stealing kills from predators, and scavenging carcasses, including those of other hippos.
and they are really good at playing snooker with small rodents.
think about it, haven’t you seen a hippo-pot-a-mouse?