An Illustrated Guide to Hippo Castration (2014)

Posted by joebig 5 days ago

Comments

Comment by snthpy 23 hours ago

Short and sweet. An absolute masterpiece of scientific writing!

A family friend used to run a travel business with tours to the Okavango Delta. When I asked him how it was going, he replied "Great, we've only ever lost one honeymoon couple to hippos"! People don't realise they are one of the most dangerous animals to humans.

Comment by trhway 20 hours ago

"Jaws" hippo edition:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/aKEgTUkpk64

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJQpq8mLbm0

Comment by tumidpandora 22 hours ago

> hippos' stunning wound-healing abilities—perhaps related to the antibacterial properties of the creepy "red sweat" that coats their skin

sounds interesting and definitely something worth looking into as well

Comment by dtgriscom 12 hours ago

Flashback to a Robin Williams bit, where Marlon Perkins of "Wild Kingdom" directs his assistant to circumcise a water buffalo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFbhByVMhXM&t=45s

Comment by pugworthy 23 hours ago

I mean, sensationalistic or "Why didn't you post on / This isn't reddit" or not, this is one of the more amazing opening sentences ever...

> Few things in this world are as elusive as a hippopotamus testicle

Comment by onionisafruit 23 hours ago

I was fond of “all the surviving animals were able to return to their feces-infested communal pools within hours of the surgery with no negative consequences”

Comment by scotty79 21 hours ago

1 out of 10 died though.

Comment by bambax 20 hours ago

We have been taught in high school that the reason humans and "all mammals" had external testes was to cool them. But elephants have internal testicles, and, apparently, so do hippos. This seems a much better strategy than having such an important (and sensitive!) organ hanging out at the mercy of predators, foes, or even banal accidents. The evolution explanation for this appears to be lacking.

Comment by seanhunter 20 hours ago

Evolution is a process of massively parallel multistart hill-climbing where the objective function is "did this creature successfully breed". It doesn't settle on a global optimum, just finds many many local optima that enable creatures to succeed in passing on their DNA.

Why in human males is the prostate such a troublesome thing? Because by the time the prostate becomes a problem, males have generally done any breeding they're going to do, so there is no advantage to natural selection to improving it further. Is it optimal? Definitely not.

Presumably it is (taking the wide view) probably a good thing that evolution doesn't find global optima or there would be far less ecological diversity.

Comment by bambax 18 hours ago

Yeah I totally agree with this. We want to find explanations and justifications for everything, but it's largely possible that the location of testes actually doesn't matter -- internal, external, whatever.

Comment by seszett 17 hours ago

> it's largely possible that the location of testes actually doesn't matter

It's not really that it doesn't matter, just that there are several different options to allow good enough fertility.

If sperm has to be stored/generated at a temperature lower than 36°C, then external testes are a solution to that, but a lower body temperature works as well. Developing enzymes that work good enough at a higher temperature also works (apparently what birds have done). And maybe just accepting a lower fitness of sperm cells works if the animal produces more of them.

Hippopotamuses have a low body temperature of about 35°C, so internal testes work for them.

Comment by tosti 16 hours ago

It's not just that. They contribute to a mans physical appearance and attractiveness.

A hippo doesn't care much about looks ;)

Comment by kjs3 16 hours ago

I'm sure lady hippos care about looks just as much as any other mammal, just different looks than a pair of low-hangers.

Comment by mjanx123 18 hours ago

Males are expendable. In humans, only about a half of males does reproduce. More 'experiments' are run on males by the nature, the phenotype variance is higher and includes more of excelent and more of detrimental variations, while females stick to the stable functional baseline.

Comment by bluescrn 18 hours ago

Having them as an exposed 'weak spot' might accelerate the evolutionary process - those who can effectively protect that weak spot have a better chance of reproducing, those who can't get filtered out of the gene pool?

Comment by anal_reactor 16 hours ago

This is a valid point that often gets missed. What is good for an individual isn't necessarily good for species as a whole.

Comment by Qem 15 hours ago

My guess is, mammals with very large body sizes have slower metabolism, so they don't run as hot as smaller creatures, and can have internal testicles without the downsides.

Comment by nkrisc 19 hours ago

The evolutionary explanation is simple: enough males with external testes successfully reproduce regardless.

Comment by hsbauauvhabzb 19 hours ago

I learnt recently that primates will actively look to damage them during fights. Not sure if this is general knowledge that I missed but I found it interesting

Comment by 18 hours ago

Comment by andsoitis 23 hours ago

Animal cruelty is immoral.

Comment by card_zero 23 hours ago

So is sanctimony, good job nobody around here is being cruel or sanctimonious.

Comment by mock-possum 21 hours ago

> The vets successfully castrated 10 out of 10 hippos with their method, losing only one of the animals to postsurgery complications

Yeah those are not good numbers.

Comment by tass 18 hours ago

According to a related article: https://www.discovermagazine.com/why-its-nearly-impossible-t...

The death was caused by an "unknown pre-existing condition" but doesn't elaborate further.

Comment by trhway 20 hours ago

Vets castrating an animal under anesthesia pales in comparison to male calves castration by using tight rubber band (AMZN sells them too) to cut the blood supply to scrotum and thus causing necrosis and ultimately scrotum and testicles falling off. Without any anesthesia. A widespread, most popular, practice in US. The animal suffers tremendous pain for several weeks. The true cost of beef.

Comment by verisimi 20 hours ago

> The true cost of beef.

There's also the animal's death.

Comment by zdc1 19 hours ago

Personally, I'm more anti-suffering than anti-death.

Comment by skeledrew 13 hours ago

Does suffering matter if death follows eventually? The dead cares about nothing, because it remembers nothing, because... it no longer is (alive).

Comment by andsoitis 12 hours ago

> Does suffering matter if death follows eventually? The dead cares about nothing, because it remembers nothing

Yes it matters. Causing suffering to a consciousness that can experience pain is inhumane.

Now, reasonable people can disagree how far to extend our circle of empathy. Some would exclude animals or even other humans (eg criminals or someone of a different ethnicity), while other people would go so far as to include ants, plants, or rocks. I think both extremes are wrong.

Perhaps more poignantly to you question, what if you ask yourself:

- does your answer change considering humans are also animals?

- regardless of target, what does it say to the character of a person who chooses to be cruel when they don’t have to

Comment by cryptonector 8 hours ago

Reasonable people can also disagree as to the amount of pain and reasons for it.

If you have surgery that involves painful recovery, should the surgeon refuse to perform it? Only if it's elective? Or it's ok because you elect it? What about required surgery on a non-human animal? Is the painful recovery justified by the surgery's necessity [to achieve a human-desired goal]? What if it's necessary to extend the animal's life, or ameliorate other pain?

In the case of TFA the intervention is part of habitat management -- preserving the species in the face of human encroachment, or even just in the face of encroachment that occurred even if no further encroachment is allowed. That seems to me like a reasonable justification for the pain caused in that case, and this is also the case for cats and dogs even though the justification is slightly different there.

Comment by andsoitis 3 hours ago

> In the case of TFA the intervention is part of habitat management -- preserving the species in the face of human encroachment, or even just in the face of encroachment that occurred even if no further encroachment is allowed. That seems to me like a reasonable justification for the pain caused in that case,

Agree. Similar story about elephants, who can wreck havoc on an ecosystem. Culling them is a good practice.

Comment by skeledrew 11 hours ago

So it's not at all about the target of the suffering. It's all about the one(s) causing it. Which suggests to me that the suffering really doesn't matter, objectively speaking. And as such it also doesn't matter how far/near the circle is extended. It ultimately boils down to the others considering and judging any given situation, not the one(s) caused to suffer (to which applicability of definition is highly questionable in the first place if it includes plants and rocks).

Of course this changes greatly if the sufferer(s) survive the ordeal for a significant amount of time beyond, as there may be repercussions, depending on the degree of the effects caused and the capacity (physical, psychological, social, etc) of the sufferer(s).

Comment by andsoitis 9 hours ago

Every living organism dies eventually. I don’t think that that is a useful argument to condone cruelty and causing suffering when it can be avoided.

Comment by 11 hours ago

Comment by cindyllm 11 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by Surac 17 hours ago

reading this i wonder how long some tech bros need for a starup that offers AI assisted hippo castration for executives as the next hype

Comment by kjs3 16 hours ago

Please don't give them any ideas. It's one small step from 'this works great on hippos!' to 'I hear there's a human population problem...'.

Comment by skeledrew 13 hours ago

We do have a human population problem. It's aging out of existence.

Comment by cryptonector 8 hours ago

Some tech bros can't bring themselves to say that it would be good for the human species to survive [for any length of time].

Comment by gnabgib 23 hours ago

(2014)

Comment by aaronbrethorst 23 hours ago

I don't think much has changed in the state of the art of hippo castration in the last twelve years.

Comment by RobotCaleb 22 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by Sniffnoy 22 hours ago

They're not saying it's not worth talking about. They're saying it should have a date tag, as is customary for old articles on Hacker News.

Comment by tomhow 22 hours ago

Please don't post snarky comments here.

That user is one of the most engaged, helpful users on HN and it's a long-standing convention that the year is appended to titles of articles that are not current.