Baby hippo of Escobar stock dies after rescue in Colombia
The roughly 15-day-old calf, found by fishermen on a riverbank without its mother, died of chronic dehydration and malnutrition despite treatment.
A roughly 15-day-old hippopotamus calf died in Colombia on Wednesday, hours after authorities rescued the malnourished animal, officials said.
The calf had been discovered by fishermen on the banks of a river without its mother before being rescued earlier that day.
The infant hippo "was admitted with chronic signs of dehydration, malnutrition, and an acute gastrointestinal condition that complicated its entire clinical picture," said a vet working for the environmental organisation Cornare.
Despite rescue and rehydration efforts, "the animal did not respond adequately to treatment and died," the vet said.
The animal had earlier been transferred to a hippo sanctuary at Hacienda Napoles, the estate previously owned by the late cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar and now a theme park.
A colony of about 200
Colombia has around 200 invasive hippos living in the wild, according to the Environment Ministry, all of them stemming from a colony brought to South America by Escobar. It is the largest hippo colony anywhere outside Africa.
Escobar imported four hippos in the 1980s for his private zoo at the hacienda. After the Medellin cartel leader's death in 1993 as he tried to elude capture by police, the animals escaped and settled along the banks of the Magdalena River.
There, they have disrupted the ecosystem and even attacked local residents. They are now considered an invasive species and are destabilising native ecosystems.
That prompted the government this year to approve a plan to cull around 80 of them, after attempts to curb their reproduction through sterilisation failed.
This article was produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI), in accordance with our editorial policy.
