For 11 hours the distressed female tried to keep the carcass afloat while chasing away Nile crocodiles.
It was 6:45 a.m. in Botswana’s Chobe National Park when Victoria Inman realized something was off.
Normally, 25 hippos would be lounging in this scenic lagoon by the Chobe River, but on this September day in 2018, the pond appeared empty—other than an object floating in the water.
As she got closer, Inman, a biology Ph.D. student at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, saw the carcass of a juvenile hippopotamus, roughly six months old and about the size of a domestic pig.
Suddenly a female hippo emerged, swimming toward the carcass aggressively. The biologist moved back and observed, fascinated, for the next 11 hours as the “distressed and confused” female—likely the mother—and later the rest
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