Hippos Go Airborne at Top Speeds, Video Footage Reveals

Hippos are much limber than you may’ve antecedently thought. The fifth-heaviest onshore mammal is susceptible of becoming airborne portion trotting astatine precocious speeds, according to a recent study retired of the University of London’s Royal Veterinary College.

While analyzing footage of 169 antithetic strides from 32 hippos, the researchers said they ne'er spotted a gallop. Instead, the exceedingly muscular mammals stuck to a trot (or near-trot) — a signifier successful which their feet onslaught the crushed successful diagonal pairs. While running, their trot featured a little aerial phase; astatine highest speeds, the hippos reportedly spent about 15% of each stride wholly airborne. This aerial signifier had not, to the researchers’ knowledge, been antecedently reported.

Their predilection to trot is an “unusual signifier for ample terrestrial mammals,” according to the researchers; rhinoceroses and giraffes, for example, employment antithetic footfall patterns astatine antithetic speeds. (However, it whitethorn not person ever been unusual; long-necked dinosaurs, for example, may’ve employed a gait somewhat akin to hippos, per unrelated research.)

Hippos walk overmuch of their days in the water, but astir dusk they “lumber onto land,” per National Geographic, to graze connected roughly 80 pounds of writer successful darkness. Their aquatic and, astatine times, aggressive quality marque the mammals tricky to study, said John R. Hutchinson, an evolutionary biomechanics prof astatine the Royal Veterinary College and the pb writer of the study.

“Hippos aren’t often kept successful captivity for casual entree and adjacent past thin to beryllium hard to enactment with due to the fact that they walk not truthful overmuch clip connected land, are progressive astatine night, are hard to motivate and highly unsafe if they are motivated, and there’s small grooming of them successful captivity,” Hutchinson told Gizmodo. In the wild, “there are each kinds of problems accessing them (you fundamentally person to get fortunate and drawback a uncommon changeable of a accelerated hippo),” helium added.

Hutchinson besides acknowledged this is simply a “rather niche topic.”

“There wasn’t an reply to this question partially due to the fact that fewer scientists had wondered (openly successful papers, anyway),” helium said. “But arsenic my probe heavy focuses connected however dense animals endure large constraints to their locomotor abilities connected land, I had to tackle it sooner oregon later.”