A baby hippopotamus that survived the tsumani waves on the Kenyan coast snuggles up to its new best friend, a giant century old tortoise in an animal facility in Mombasa, 06 January 2005. The hippopotamus, nicknamed Owen and weighing about 300 kilograms (650 pounds), was swept down Sabaki River into the Indian Ocean, then forced back to shore when tsumani waves struck the Kenyan coast on December 26, before wildlife rangers rescued him.
“It is incredible. A-less-than-a-year-old hippo has adopted a male tortoise, about a century old, and the tortoise seems to be very happy with being a ‘mother’,” ecologist Paula Kahumbu said.
“After it was swept and lost its mother, the hippo was traumatised. It had to look for something to be a surrogate mother. Fortunately, it landed on the tortoise and established a strong bond. They swim, eat and sleep together,” the ecologist added.
“The hippo follows the tortoise exactly the way it follows its mother. If somebody approaches the tortoise, the hippo becomes aggressive, as if protecting its biological mother,” Kahumbu added.
“The hippo is a young baby, he was left at a very tender age and by nature, hippos are social animals that like to stay with their mothers for four years,” he explained. In 2002, a barren Kenyan lioness made several
attempts to play mother to baby antelopes, one of which ended with a rival lion making a meal out of the calf.
As of December 2005, a year after their initial meeting, Owen and Mzee were still together. By March of 2007, conservation workers had removed Mzee from the enclosure and introduced Owen to Cleo, a 13-year-old female hippo who had gone without the companionship of her own species for over ten years.
