We need to have a serious chat about hippo poop .
I know this will be hard , because the wrangle “ hippo poop ” will never not be funny ( I am literally laughing as I publish them ) , but it ’s actually an significant piece of the conservation puzzle on Kenya ’s Mara River .
According to new findings write inScience Advanceson Wednesday , hippos act as a lively conduit for transporting silica from land to the water thanks to their prolific gut movements . An astounding 880 pounds of silica gets dumped via hippo dumps into the Mara River every day , and this “ biogenic silica flux ” allows the base of the nutrient mountain chain in Lake Victoria downstream to flourish . If the hippos were to disappear , the intact food web would budge without their regular deposits .
Silica source.Photo: Getty
The breathing in for the study make out in part when Jonas Schoelynck , a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp , caught a presentation on hippos ’ role in the Mara ecosystem and in part when he realize “ that they spread tons of dung in the piss while twisting their tail around . ” Previous inquiry into Mara River hippo poop ( it really is a thing ) show that their prolific trash dump — the average hippo can drop down nearly 40 pounds of poop daily — cancause monolithic Pisces die offsin the Mara . But the new findings show how what taketh aside the fish also giveth life to Lake Victoria ’s diatoms , tiny alga that require silica to build their cell wall .
There ’s a fair amount of silica available in the grasses of the savannas around the Mara . And it turns out hippos love to pout down on those grasses , eat upwards of 55 pounds per day . That ’s a batch of fiber , which entail a lot of poop . Some of it ends up on land because hippos apparently have no queasiness about tell on where they eat . The same is on-key for lots of other grazers as well . But since hippos spend half the daylight in the water , just about half their bowel movement also cease up there .
Schoelynck and a squad of researcher and parkland ranger from Masai Mara National Reserve go into the plain to taste the poo and river weewee and deconstruct what the hippos were dropping off in and alongside the river . The results show that hippo poop ( or “ egestion in water ” as the scientist so courteously describe it ) is responsible for more than three - quarters of the silica that ends up in the river .
“ This studies record for the first time the role of orotund herbivores in help the silica in plants to be ship to rivers and lake , ” Schoelynck said . “ Hippos act in this way as a variety of conveyor belt ship silica from Edwin Herbert Land to piddle . ”
That silicon dioxide - rich water eventually terminate up in Lake Victoria where it allows diatoms to flourish . The diatom are responsible for suck carbon copy dioxide out of the air and forming the al-Qaida of the solid food Sir Ernst Boris Chain . The subject notes without hippos , the nutrient WWW would get the crap kicked out of it both literally and figuratively . Diatoms would mature less plentiful . Levels of nitrogen and phosphorus would fall out of balance compared with silica , which could make life - suffocating cyanobacteria blooms more common . In fact , that ’s been hap since the 1980s , and the enquiry indicates decline hippo population may be behind the tendency .
“ I trust indeed that with my study , the hippo is estimated as more important than just being a coolheaded tourist attractiveness , ” Schoelynck sound out .
Which yes . But also . Hippo poop .
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