FACTORALY - E127 HIPPOS

Episode Date: February 12, 2026

Hippos are huge. Actually, it's a bigger subject than you might think, too. This episode looks into these deadly - and fast - animals with their own built-in sunblock. As always, click on the pics to dive into the river of facts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, Bruce. Hi, Simon. How are you today? I'm feeling fat. Are you? You're not looking fat. You're looking very svelte. Thank you very much.

You're welcome. So this is fact something. Fact or, fact orally orally? Yes, orally facts. Fact orally. Okay, so ears or mouths. I've heard, well, yes, either or both. Yes, one of those.

What is factorally? Well, factorily is 30 minutes or so of two, voiceover people using their voices to spout stuff. Yes, that's a very good summary. The stuff we spout is, well, we find it interesting, hopefully you do as well. Essentially, we're nerds. We like random facts and curiosities. And proud of it. Absolutely. We have a random subject generated for us each week by our random subject generator. Yes. We go away. We do some research. We come back. We chat. You listen to it. Everyone's a winner. Yes. Apart from hippopotamai.

Apart from them. Except it's not hippopotamite. It's hippopotamuses. Right. I've seen both written and both accepted by the community at large. Yes. I just like hippopotamai. It sounds nice. I think that's from Flanders and Swan Song. Oh, is it? Yes, which we'll come to, I'm sure. I'm sure we will. So this week we are talking about hippopotamuses. That's why I prefer hippopotamines. Let's call them hippos. Oh, yes. Good shout. Yes. Whoever was the first person to shorten hippopotamus to hippo.

Did the English language a great favor. Oh, yes. Certainly did. So what is a hippopotamus? Why are they called hippopotamuses? So a hippopotamus is, well, the definition of a hippopotamus I found, is a large, thick-skinned, semi-aquatic African mammal with massive jaws and large tusks. and thus endeth our lecture. That is what a hippo is. The word comes from Greek. So the Greek hippos means horse and Potamus means river. Yes.

So it's a river horse, which is odd because it looks nothing like a horse. But there you go. I believe we mentioned this in our episode on circuses. We talked about the hippodrome in London. We did. You're right. Up until that point, I had often wondered why the hippodrome,

a beautiful venue in central London, is covered in statues of horses, not hippos. Or, alternatively, why it's called the hippodrome. Yes. It's horse. Welcome to the hippodrome. Indeed. So the hippodrome used to operate as a sort of a circus.

They rode horses around in a ring. And they decided to call it the Greek word for horse track or horse race course, which is hippodrome. Yeah. But, you know, hippos are hippos. Yes, they are. They've been around a long time. They're actually related to whales. Yes, isn't that odd?

Yeah. So hippos in their current form, what you and I would recognize as a hippo, has been around for about seven million years. Gosh. But about 12 million years ago, it had an ancestor which I won't try to pronounce, because it's one of those archaeological Latin names that's horrible. There was a creature which sort of went in two different directions, evolutionarily speaking.

One direction led to whales and dolphins and porpoises. the other direction eventually led to hippos. Yes. For a very long time, it was thought by naturalists. Is it naturalists or naturists? I always get those too confused. One of them strips their clothes off. Yes, the other one.

For the longest time, it was assumed by naturalists that hippos were related to pigs. Yes. It was only in 1909 through various scientific discoveries that they realized actually these things are more closely related to whales and dolphins. and things. They have been around in human consciousness, certainly for a while. There was an Egyptian god whose name was Tawarret. Right. And Tawarret was like a hippo standing on its rear legs.

So it's like standing on two legs. And it was a symbol of fertility in motherhood. Oh, okay. Often portrayed as pregnant. Oh, right, okay. So Egyptians were very fond of hippos. Right. So we've known about them since at least Egyptian times, if not early.

Yes. And of course, then there's Pliny. Aw. What did Pliny have to say about Hippos? Did he sort of say they were bright orange and could fly? Almost. So Pliny the Elder comes up on these things quite a bit. And his beliefs are unusual. Yes. I like to refer to him as Pliny, take it with a pinch of salt, the elder. So he believed that hippos excreted blood.

Oh, right. So hippo sweat, if you like, starts off as a clear liquid. but as soon as it hits the atmosphere, it turns a kind of a red colour. And what that sweat does is it actually does two things. One, it moisturises the skin of the hippo. And two, it acts like a sunblock. Yeah. It's an odd thing, isn't it?

I'd never looked into this. I've often wondered why hippos look so pink when they're on land. Yes. You know, their top half, when they're sort of just above the water, they're quite clearly grey. Yes. But you see one on land and they can be quite pink at times. And yes, this term blood sweat, I've sort of seen referred to a number of times.

Yes. One of the things that it does do, which is quite interesting, because hippos are mammals, therefore they give milk. But the milk from a hippo is pink. Oh, do you know what? I knew that somewhere in the back of my mind. I'd forgotten about that. The thing about hippo milk is it's not actually pink.

It's white or creamy. But occasionally it gets tainted with this. Blood sweat, if you like. The stuff that comes out of the skin of the hippo, which turns it pink. Oh, I see. How interesting. Blood sweat also acts as an antibacterial. Yes.

So hippo's skin, they have really thick skin. Their skin is about two to two and a half inches thick. But incredibly sensitive. They sit out in the African sun. They are prone to sunburn and sort of getting dry, cracked skin. So it moisturises the skin and acts as an antibacteriolacty. for when it does sort of get damaged either by my rival hippos or whatever. So it's a multi-purpose substance.

There are scientific companies, like cosmetic companies, looking into the blood sweat, to see whether they can make sunblock better and also antibacterial. So you can have like a factor 50 antibacterial moisturiser, which would be perfect. Yes, absolutely, yeah. Hippos are the 10th deadliest animal for humans. That's bizarre.

I know. They kill between 500 and 3,000 people a year. It's one of those facts that I've never understood. They look so cute. Yeah. They're deadlier than lions and sharks. Yeah. I wonder how much of that is just human stupidity.

We get too close to them because they look slow and docile and cuddly. And then we suddenly realize, oh, actually, these things have tusks that grow up to a foot long. They can run up to. 30 miles per hour on land, so I'm never going to outrun one. They can run 15 miles per hour in shallow water. If you get too close to one, it's not wise. No, no, absolutely not. And they're not usually on their own.

They're usually in pods. That's right, yes. They can bite a crocodile in half. Gosh. I remember seeing a sort of a nature documentary of hippos and crocodiles wading around side by side in shallow water. And I thought, oh, that hippo, better look out for that. that crocodile, that looks rather nasty.

The crocodile just turns tail and runs away from the hippo. Absolutely. Very sensible crocodile. Their jaws are incredibly powerful. So they can open their jaws to a 180 degree angle. What? It's quite cartoony. You know, you sort of picture a cartoon character

going to the dentist. Their head just flips back. It's kind of like that. Wow. And they're able to bite with a force of around 2,000 PSI. You see those videos of a zookeeper chucking a watermelon into a hippo's mouth and it just explodes. So yes, if it does happen to get near something that it doesn't quite like the look of,

it will kill it. Yes. But with all that force, with these massive great tasks and huge jaws and all the rest of it, hippos are herbivores. Yes. They don't deliberately go out of their ways. to attack, kill and eat animals. If plant life is in low supply,

if there's a sort of a drought and there isn't any decent grass around, they will sometimes eat carrion, things that other things have killed. Yes. But primarily they eat grass and leaves and short plants and things. So the disproportion between

the massive size and power and deadliness of this creature, and yet it goes around eating plants, I find that quite charming. It could. It could. But it won't. Yeah, exactly.

I'd rather not. Yes. I mean, and then they're nocturnal as well, which I quite like. So you do see, you know, the pictures that you see of them because it's easier to shoot a photograph of the hippopotamist during the day. Of course. But actually, they're much more active at night than they are during the day. They often sleep during the day. Yes.

What they actually do, which is mind-blowing, is they sleep underwater. but they come up for air while they're asleep. Oh, is that right? Okay, there's something we should mention first, which people may not realize. They can't swim. Yes, isn't that odd? Everyone knows hippos can swim.

Yes. But they can't. They can't swim. So because they're so dense, what they do is they sink to the bottom. But they can hold their breath for ages and they can close their nostrils and their eyes and their ears and stuff. So the hippo basically takes in the air, sinks to the bottom,

and then either goes to sleep and then when they need air they just kind of bob up to the top they breathe out, breathe in and go back down again or when they're walking around they go down to the bottom and they walk around on the bottom of the river That's brilliant, isn't it?

We have show notes on the blog at our website Which is factorily.com Factorily.com? Yeah, that one. Good. So what I'll do is I'll put some video up of hippos walking around underwater. It's beautiful to watch.

They look very elegant. They do, don't they? Yes. It's quite peaceful looking. Yes. There's a place called the Okavango Delta. Well pronounced. Thank you.

It's all a nice shallow river with reeds and stuff in it. But you can see hippo roots through the reeds because they make kind of passageways. And what happens is all the fresh water from the main river goes off in tributaries which are made by hippos. That's amazing. Hippo highways, if you like. That's excellent.

Yeah. And what they do is they deliver fresh water to other parts of dense forestation and waterways. Wow. Well done, hippos. Good for hippos. Now, hippos have a tendency to do a weird thing with their dung. Let's talk about hippo dung. So, like many animals do, hippos have a tendency to mark their dung.

territory with poo essentially. We in poo. We and poo. But, you know, not just raise your leg and have a delicate, discrete little wee or a little mound of dung. They poo a great force and they wag their tails back and forth

like a really, really fast windscreen wiper. And it spreads this urine feces mixture absolutely everywhere. It's like a it's like a fertilizer machine on a farm. It just spreads the stuff.

Like a slurry spreader. Exactly that. That's the word. Thank you. Like a slurry spreader. It's just like that. And they use it to mark their territory. And you often sort of get two male hippos standing really close to each other,

each one at the furthest extent of their own territory, just doing this thing in each other's general direction to sort of say, this bit's mine, that bit's yours. And it makes an absolute mess. Of course it does. it does. But it's all very healthy and good for the soil. It's all good for the soil. Birds gather around. You sort of get a lot of eagrits and stalk type birds in those areas, sort of wading through the mud. Yeah. They come along and eat the leftovers.

Lovely. But yes, it's an odd thing to watch. Yes. They're quite heavy hippos, aren't they? Yes, they are. How heavy are they? Well, I've seen sort of up to three tons. Right. I think they're the second heavy. land mammal in the world after elephants? So third, they actually come after white rhinos as well. Oh, do they? Yeah. Ah. This was a weird thing because I kept on seeing websites saying the hippo is the third

largest land mammal after elephants and rhinos. And I thought, well, what about giraffes? They're quite big, aren't they? You know, height-wise at least. They base this on mass. So the average hippo is about one and a half tons. The heaviest hippo that they've recorded was four. and a half tons. They are hungry, aren't they?

They are hungry. Hungry, hungry hippos. They eat around 100 pounds of vegetation per day. Wow. It's quite a lot of grass. It's a lot of veggie. One of your favourite words includes a word hippo, doesn't it? Oh, look at that. We both wrote down the same thing. That's great.

Well, I know it's one of your favourite words. So I thought I'd leave it to you. Thank you so much. So what is this word that you like? One of my favourite words, Bruce, is hippopotamosposo, sesquipidalia phobia. Very good. Thank you very much.

Or philia rather than phobia. Yes, the love of, yes, okay. Yes. The hate of or the love of? The phobia has an extra letter in it, I believe. And therefore it's used for great effects. Yes. What does it mean?

It's basically the fear of long words. which is cruel, isn't it? It's like why it's dyslexia so hard to spell? Well, it's called an autological word. Oh, is it? Yes. So it's a word that is kind of what it is. So words like polysyllabic is is autological because it's got lots of syllables in it.

I see, yes, okay. And then you've got things like short, which is also autological, because it is a short word that says short. That's brilliant. I've never heard that phrase before. That's very nice. Yes. So there's an opposite of that, which is.

heterological. But autological words are words that sound like what they are. They kind of do what they say on the tin. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Ah. But this word obviously is made up of lots of different things. Cesquipidalia already exists. It's an old word that literally means a word that's a foot and a half long. Yes. Put monstrosso in front of that to make it really big. Put hippopotam in front of that to make it really, really big. sticophobia on the end.

Yes. No one is totally sure, you know, whether this word has existed for a long time or not, but the first time it was written down was in a poem relatively recent, actually, a poem in 2007 by a poet called Amy Nezakumatathil. Okay. And she just seems to have made this word up in one of her poems, and it's, yeah, become... It's stuck. It's stuck.

Well, there's no a book. There's a book of the long words in the English language. Oh, is there? Which has got that name. Oh, great. That sounds like my kind of book. Yeah, I'll bet it is, actually. I assume it will contain anti-disestablishmentarianism.

One hopes, yes. And the floxinoxia helifigilific, that one, whatever that is. Oh, floxia noxia no heliphyification. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Like I said at the beginning, nerds. Hippos appear in various different forms in entertainment.

The weirdest one I found was there's a Japanese. gun game called Kabakik. And Kabah is the name for Hippo in Japanese. And what you do is you put like a cartridge. Again, I'll show you this in the show notes. Yes. But you put a cartridge into a thing that looks like a gun. Right.

And you aim the gun at your head quite close, like within sort of a few inches. Okay. And if the cartridge doesn't have a charge in it, nothing happens when you pull the trigger. This is a kid's game, right? This is bizarre. But if the cartridge has got something in it, then it kicks out a hippo's foot into the side of your head. Oh my goodness.

Yeah. So the Kabak... It's kind of Russian roulette. Exactly. Mixed with a pop gun. Yes. Mixed with a hippo. Yes.

I want one. I'm not sure you can still buy them. Oh. The other way that we experience hippos in popular culture is in film and in song. So in film, for example, one of Disney's first animated films was Fantasia. Oh, yes. And it had dancing hippos. So it did.

They were dancing to Ponticelli's Dance of the Hours. Brilliant. The lead hippos called Hyacinth in that. Oh, Hyacinth the hippo. Yes. And there have been other animated hippos, modo, modo. Motto, yes. Madagascar.

Yeah, and Gloria. In glory, of course, yeah. Yes. So Gloria and Motto. But when you think about what we've just told you, right, that they are one of the most dangerous animals in the world. Yeah. They kill people to make them into Gloria and Motomoto from Madagascar.

It's quite sweet. Yeah, it is, isn't it? Again, I just have quite a hard time accepting that they are that lethal because they're cute. They smile. They are very cute. And in fact, there are two types of hippos. Oh, yes.

Oh, yes, there are. So there's a hippo, and then there's a pygmy hippo. Yes, which is even cuter. Which is so cute that one of them became an internet sensation. Do you know about this? No, I don't. Okay. So there's a baby pygmy hippo in a zoo in Thailand called Kalkyo Zoo.

And it's called Mudeng. Okay. If you look up Mudeng on the internet, you don't have to because you can go to our show notes and find that all about it. But about a couple of years ago, this baby pygmy hippo was. born called Moudang and it went viral because the keeper was filming it sort of growing up and was posting these these videos on YouTube and stuff or on TikTok and it was just going mental people travel from all over the world to go to this zoo in Thailand to look at this baby but it's not a baby anymore it's about a year and a half two years old this this pygmy hippo

how wonderful and and it's named Moudang means bouncy pork which I think is great. Oh, that's brilliant. One of the first things that pop up into my mind when thinking of hippos in popular culture and on film, do you remember the TV series The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin? Yes. When he imagined his mother-in-law.

That's it. Every time his mother-in-law was mentioned, there was just a cutaway little scene of a hippo lolloping along with a little bit of sort of brass instrumentation in the background. That's instantly what I think of when I think of hippos. I mean, the thing that I think of most when I think of hippopotamus is Flanders and Swan. Yes, of course. Mud, mud, glorious mud.

Yeah. There's quite interesting. There's a line in it which is by the banks of the cool Shalimar in the intro. Oh, yes. In the Shalimars are a river in India where there aren't any hippos. Oh, well, that doesn't make sense then, does it? No, no, it doesn't make sense at all. They had, going back several hundreds of thousands of years,

hippos were more widespread than they are now. They seem to have sort of ended up in Africa. Right. But going back to, you know, prehistory, they also lived in Europe. There have been hippo fossils found in the Thames estuary. What? Yeah.

So hundreds of thousands of years ago, hippos wallowed around in the River Thames. So technically, on the site where the hippodrome is in London, there could have been hippos. Yeah, why not? Let's go with that. At some point in these podcasts, we often talk about the Guinness Book of Records.

Yes, we do. Are there any records relating to hippos? Literally, three. Okay. Two of them are practically the same, so it's a bit disappointing. But, yeah, very, very few. Always with animals, you know,

you could find the fastest, heaviest, biggest, oldest, etc. So those records probably do exist, but I didn't find them. What I did find was the largest collection of hippopotamus-related items, which isn't really even that fantastical a number, considering

other things. Key ring and stuff like that. Yeah, exactly. So Rebecca Fuscoe in Connecticut, in the USA, in 2016, got the record for owning 604 hippo-related items. That's still a lot of hippo items. You've got to be quite an enthusiast, haven't you? Yeah.

And that includes figurines, clothing, books, toys, key rings, jewelry, games, etc. But that was in 2016. So you assume in the last 10 years she's acquired even more, but just hasn't updated her record. She'll be bound to have a load of Moodeng. Oh, I bet, yeah. I bet. And the other two records are not even hippo-related. They're related to the game, Hungry, Hungry Hippo.

Okay. For anyone who hasn't played this absolute classic of a game, this was an absolute staple in my household. I used to play hungry, hungry hippos a lot when I was a kid. You have a little board with four plastic hippos all facing the centre, and they each have a lever sticking out their backside. When you hit the lever, the hippo's mouth lurches forward and gobbles up some marbles up some marbles that are spinning around in the middle of the board.

Now you say it out loud. It sounds a bit rubbish, really, isn't it? Well, given that you've told us what happens with hippos tales anyway, this sounds really. Well, that's true, yes. Yeah. So the two records there are essentially the fastest time to clear all of the marbles in a game of hungry, hungry hippos. There's one record for the fastest time set by an individual. That's one person smashing all four hippos, 11.47 seconds.

Okay, that's quite quick. Which was achieved by Lim Kai Yi in Malaysia in 2024. The other record is the fastest time for two people, which was set by David Rush and his son Peter in Idaho. So it was a family effort. Yep. And that was 5.8 seconds. So half the time?

Yeah, pretty much, which makes sense because there's twice as many people. Yes. So yeah, that's it. Of all of the records I found about hippos, none of them are actually related to real-life hippos. Good. I'm very happy about that. There you go.

Yes. I think hippos should be left alone by hippos. Yes, they should. So do you have any other facts about hippos? Because I'm out of hippo facts. No, all of my hippo facts have... Submerged. Submerged.

I think it's time to go and bask in the mud. Yes, gloriously. So, well, before people go, is there anything we'd like them to do? Oh, as always, if our dear listeners could be so kind as to go and do... give us a little bit of a rating and a review on their podcast players of choice. How many stars do you reckon this show's worth, Bruce? I reckon it's worth

five hippos. Okay. There we go then. A pod. A pod. A pod of hippo stars, please. And it's a podcast, so how appropriate. Oh, it is! So that's one thing they could do. What else could they do, Bruce? You could tell your friends about factorily.

They will love you forever. Absolutely. This is a great place. And we've got over a hundred episodes on The most obscure stuff that you can possibly imagine. I mean, hippos is bad enough, but cucumbers? Yes, absolutely. And everything in between. Yes.

Actually, the other thing I find it useful for is people have told me is going to sleep. Yes. I've heard that. Yeah. So people go to sleep to our voices because we have nice, smooth voices. Yes, easy. Not because we're boring. No.

Because we're soothing. Soothing. Yes, exactly. And having done those things, you can go and hit the subscribe button so that every Thursday morning you'll get a notification saying a brand new topic has landed for you. Great. And we do have socials. We have Facebook and Instagram. We don't use them. But you're very welcome to contribute should you wish to.

And of course, we've got something wrong. We've bound to have got something wrong in this episode. Oh yes. So if we have, please write to us at hello at factorily.com and tell us how wrong we are. Or add your own hippo-related facts if you think we've missed anything. Yes, we'd love that. So thank you all so much for coming along and listening to us talk about hippos. Please come again next time for another fun-filled factual episode of... Factori.

Bye-bye. Au-voir.