Nile crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus)

[GuateGojira]

(11-08-2019, 08:35 PM)BorneanTiger Wrote: Hippos are much bigger than these crocodiles, so they can dominate the crocs on an individual basis: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article...cture.html

But if an army of hippos is outnumbered by an army of crocs, then the hippos are in trouble:

Back in Zambia, 2014, an army of about 100 crocs attacked a group of hippos: https://www.nydailynews.com/news/ferocio...-1.1758584, https://www.express.co.uk/news/nature/47...-of-hippos

I will want to clarify some things here.

First of all, the video of the crocs "attacking" the hippos is fake, in fact we can see that is a series of different films and the guy of the channel "Life of Crocodile" (which is obviously a Croc "fan") is critiziced in the comments. I also remember that the baby hippo was injured by other hippos, not by the crocodiles and the dead animal at the endof the video was already dead, probably killed by other hippo, the crocs did not killed him they are just scavenging the carcase.

Second, the link on the images is also incorrect and very sensacionalist. The crocs did not killed that hippo, the hippo was already dead, you can see it by the color of of the carcase. The other hippos are separated from the group of crocs because they are eating and are very aggresive in that moment. So, the crocs did not killed the hippo, probably it died of other circunstances, but is true that no hippo will challenge that group of crocs eating, it make no sense to them to pick a futile fight agains a group of animals that can kills you, specially when the other members of your group are not interested.

Hippos clearly dominate over crocs most of the time, they even kill them, but probably crocs will never predate on an adult hippo, those are just "stories" of natives. Some people may say that "Gustave" the giant man-eater was the exception, but I even doubt in those stories, specially when there is no evidence of the size of that animal, just pictures with no reference or any other thing to compare the size of that animal. Reply