Kumar, a 71-year-old retired sonographer, caught this fierce contest on camera as a crocodile found out firsthand why it shouldn’t mess with hippos.
He told Latest Sightings he was part of “a Dutch group of around 18 people” on the day, when their “guide took [them] out on a drive to the Hippo Pool”.
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Harish’s wife notified him that something was going on in the water, and that was when he began filming the extraordinary battle between a lone crocodile and an army of hippos.
Territorial Hippos
Large bodies of water are essential for a hippo to live a happy and healthy life. They use the water and the wet mud around it to keep themselves cool on hot days, and much of the hippo’s reproductive cycle relies on being in water.
Feeding takes place on land, as hippos are herbivorous animals and graze on grass, but for other activities, hippos spend their time in the water, in their territory.
For this reason, they are ready to defend it fiercely, and their rotund appearance can often make the threat they pose seem deceptively small.
Maybe this crocodile underestimated them, or maybe it was trying to snag a baby from the edges of the bloat.
Highly Evolved Killing Machines
Crocodiles have evolved to become an incredibly dangerous predator, capable of surging up from the water to catch deer and other animals that come too close.
Yet, even they will think twice about attacking a hippo. The relative size difference between an adult of either species is a key factor, with hippos being significantly larger.
Most of a crocodile’s strength is focused in its jaw, but an adult hippo is simply too big for a crocodile to fit in its mouth, rendering its main weapon useless, unless they target a much younger hippo.
Finding It Out The Hard Way
This crocodile is finding out very rapidly that its main weapon is very ineffective against a single hippo, let alone the maelstrom of enormous animals it’s facing.
With an inevitability that can only belong to natural events, the hippos seem to have assumed a tornado-like formation, with several on the outskirts working their way in towards the epicenter where the crocodile was struggling for its life.
While the hippos might be too big for the croc’s jaws, the unfortunate reptile is vulnerable to their bites, and it can only be seen in the storms of muddy water thrown up by its thrashing.
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Forcibly Ejected
The crocodile was unable to stand up to the hippo assault, but with so many bodies churning the water, the hippos ended up pushing the croc over them until it reached the edge of the bloat.
After the hippos had ejected the croc from the center of the circle, it stayed under the murky water. It likely took the opportunity to escape when it could and fled the scene.