February 15th is World Hippo Day. And we intend to celebrate with some hippo photos, videos, and, of course, a game of Hungry Hungry Hippos.

Hippos are massive and fierce, but also water-loving vegetarians. Despite their aggressive behavior, huge-size, and preference for muddy waterholes, hippos somehow remain cute. And that is especially true of hippo babies.

Sadly, hippos have suffered from habitat loss across their sub-Saharan range. And hippo numbers have also been decimated by hunting for meat and poaching for their ivory teeth. In May of 2006, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature placed the hippo on their Red List of Threatened Species, specifically identifying the hippo as vulnerable. Climate change, with increasing periods of drought in Africa, will only make matters worse for hippo populations. The hippo population now stands at about 125,000 animals.

While hippos are threatened in Africa, they can be invasive elsewhere. In the 1980s, Pablo Escobar, the Columbian drug lord, imported four hippos to his hacienda, sixty miles east of Medellín. After Escobar’s death in 1993, the hippos were more or less left to their own devices. They quickly proliferated and moved out into the Magdalena River, something Jordan Salama detailed in his great book about the Magdalena, Every Day the River Changes.

In 1910, the American Hippo Bill narrowly failed in Congress. Louisiana Representative Robert F. Broussard had introduced the bill, claiming that hippos would help eliminate the water hyacinth, which impeded navigation and flood control in his home state, and also provide meat to American consumers. Of course, former president Theodore Roosevelt backed the bill, as did The New York Times, which called hippo meat “lake cow bacon.”

We will leave you to enjoy the day with this last video of a adolescent hippo playing with – and terrorizing – a crocodile: