PRIVATE ZOO – Pablo Escobar’s hippos give clues to extinct species

Pablo Escobar had a private zoo on his farm with four hippos who, after the shooting death of the drug trafficker in 1993, were abandoned. Since then, their number has increased to 80/100 specimens that roam the rivers of Colombia. But have they become an invasive pest?

Until now, both scientists and the general public have considered these giant herbivores as invasive pests that should not be uncontrolled by the American continent, but now a new study in the PNAS magazine led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst (United States) says that they are not so bad.

Pablo Escobar’s hippos could help offset a legacy of extinctions – that is, they have been seen to restore many important traits that had been lost for thousands of years.

This is the main conclusion scientists have come to after a global analysis comparing the ecological traits of introduced herbivores – body size, diet, or habitat – with those of the past.

Although there are some introduced herbivores that have a practically total ecological coincidence with extinct, in other cases the introduced species represents a mixture of traits seen in extinct species, says John Rowan, author of this work.

For example, wild hippos in South America are similar in diet and body size to extinct giant flames, while a strange type of extinct notoungulate mammal shares large size and semi-aquatic habitats with hippos.

In a press release, the University of Massachusetts Amherst explains that in most cases the modern natural world is thought to be very different than it was during the past 45 million years.

However, the introduction of species worldwide by humans has resulted in the restoration of lost ecological features in many ecosystems, making the world more like the pre-extinction of the late Pleistocene.

In their analyzes, the researchers were able to compare species that are not necessarily closely linked to each other, but are similar in how they affect their ecosystems, Erick Lundgren, from Sydney University of Technology, details. (Australia).

In doing so, he adds, it was possible to quantify the extent to which introduced species make the world more or less similar to the pre-extinction past: “Surprisingly, they make the world more similar.”

And it is that 64% of the herbivores introduced by humans are more similar to extinct species than to local ones, this study concludes.

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