Endangered
Pygmy hippopotamus
Choeropsis liberiensis
A rare nocturnal forest creature, the pygmy hippopotamus is a difficult animal to study in the wild.
Appearance
The skin is greenish-black or brown, shading to a creamy gray on the lower body.
Yet, the pygmy is only half as tall as the hippopotamus and weighs less than 1/4 as much as its larger cousin.
Range and habitat
The pygmy hippopotamus or pygmy hippo is a small hippopotamid that is native to the forests and swamps of West Africa, primarily in Liberia, with small populations in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Ivory Coast. Behaviors such as mating and giving birth may occur in water or on land. The pygmy hippopotamus is herbivorous, feeding on ferns, broad-leaved plants, grasses, and fruits it finds in the forests.
Some populations inhabit protected areas, such as the Gola Forest Reserve in Sierra Leone.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
Like the common hippopotamus, the pygmy hippopotamus emerges from the water at dusk to feed. The pygmy hippopotamus spends about six hours a day foraging for food.
Pygmy hippos are herbivorous. A study of breeding behavior in the wild has never been conducted. The artificial conditions of captivity may cause the observed behavior of pygmy hippos in zoos to differ from natural conditions. In zoos they breed as monogamous pairs.
In crisis
Introduced to zoos in the early 20th century, they breed well in captivity and the vast majority of research is derived from zoo specimens. The survival of the species in captivity is more assured than in the wild. In a 2015 assessment, the International Union for Conservation of Nature estimated that fewer than 2,500 pygmy hippos remain in the wild. Pygmy hippos are primarily threatened by loss of habitat, as the forests are logged and converted to farm land, and are also vulnerable to poaching, hunting for bushmeat, natural predators and war.
The greatest threat to the remaining pygmy hippopotamus population in the wild is loss of habitat. As forests shrink, the populations become more fragmented, leading to less genetic diversity in the potential mating pool.
Pygmy hippopotamus is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Pygmy hippopotamus, Wikidata item Q22110899. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
