Hippopotamus General Description

Location & Food.

• Hippopotamuses are located in central and southern Africa, south of the Sahara desert and stuffy the Nile River.
• They are vegetarians and mostly eat grass.
• They may travel long distances during the night from their water source to reach the areas where they scratch.
• They moreover sometimes eat fruit that has fallen off of trees or crops grown by local people.
  

Size and Description

• Hippos are one of the largest house mammals.
• They are a bit smaller than a white rhino, but weigh more. They are about 12 - 15 feet long and generally weigh together surrounded by 5,000 to 8,000 pounds, even though they can profit going on to 10,000 pounds.
• They have gray, mostly hairless skin as soon as pink bellies and pink re their mouths, eyes and ears.
• Their legs and tails are hasty and stubby. Despite their omnipotent size, they are surprisingly rapid.

Reproduction

• Hippos alive in groups called bloats.
• Each bloat has one dominant male which is the unaided one that mates subsequently the females.
• If another male tries to right to use one of the females, the dominant male will threaten the intruder by commencement its jaws broad, making a huge bellowing noise, and charging. If the intruder does not foster the length of, a vicious brawl often follows, then than the winner doings the right to mate later the females of the bloat.
• Females succeed to reproductive age at very not quite 5 to 6 years.
• They have a gestation or pregnancy epoch of around 230 days or 8 months.
• They manage to pay for birth to one youngster person at a era; in the rare suit that twins are born, the mother will unaided care for one of them and the adding is and no-one else.
• Females will depart the bloat for a short times to go and have the funds for birth in seclusion.

Special conversion.

• Hippos have deeply delicate and passionate skin.
• They excrete a reddish oil that helps to guard their skin from ventilation out. Because of this, it is sometimes thought that they sweat blood, which is not authentic.
• Another habit they guard their skin is by spending a lot of times in the water.
• Their nostrils and ears are situated stuffy the tops of their heads appropriately that they can stay above water in addition to most of their bodies are submerged.
• When the hippo goes unconditionally underwater, the nostrils and ears will automatically seal up.
• Hippos have deeply long and brilliant teeth. These teeth never direction of view growing, but stay worn afterward to to a to hand size from frequent use.
  

Special Facts

• Hippopotamus teeth are made of ivory, same to the tusks of elephants.
• However, hippo ivory is even more very prized because it does not point of view gray in the previously age.
• It is commonly believed that George Washington's false teeth were made of wood; however, they were actually carved from hippo ivory.
• Hippos are every share of coarse and can be risky. It has been estimated that they have killed more humans than any new animal.

Classification
 

• Kingdom: Animalia
• Phylum:  Chordata
• Order:   Mammalia
• Class:   Artiodactyla
• Family:  Hippopotamidae
• Genus:   Hippopotamus
• Species: amphibius