When the hot south sun rises over the savanna and the heat begins to build up, the hippos hide in the water. These animals with thick and very durable skin seem to us an insensitive creature. No wonder their skin was once made kiboko, whip, – the menacing weapon of slavers.
It is elastic and surprisingly durable. That’s why people believe that during the day, hippos hide in the water from us and other large and dangerous predators. In fact, this is not so.
All day hippopotamuses spend in water, after all at them – extremely sensitive skin reacting to the slightest touch. Especially dangerous for her scorching African sun. Only with the onset of darkness animals are poisoned on the pasture. Where animals constantly graze, they trample in coastal reeds and bushes not trails, but broad roads, lay trenches in steep coastal slopes.
Hippos are unpretentious. When the sun withers the savannas and the grass stalks become like metal wire, only the hippos continue to calmly graze. The fact is that they have an amazing fourteen-chambered stomach, in which dry grass, consisting of solid cellulose, digest special microorganisms. These hippopotamuses are similar to cows, but the buttocks have only a four-chamber stomach.
