Working at the Milwaukee County Zoo, we spent three days developing a "hippo budget" to be able to compare what goes into a hippo with what comes out. To know what went in, we weighed and took samples of all of their food each morning. To know what came out, we filled the hippo pool with clean water each morning before letting the hippos in, and we collected a sample of this "Before Hippo" water. Then we let the hippos spend 24 hours wallowing in the pool. The next morning, after the hippos had been moved into nearby cages, we took a sample of the "After Hippo" water. It was amazing how much the water changed from Before to After! Then we slowly drained the pool through a mesh seive, and shoveled out and weighed all the feces, totaling over 1,110 pounds of hippo poop in three days!
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| Chris getting ready to shovel out hippo poop |
Want to catch a glimpse of what all this looked like without getting your hands dirty? Check out the time-lapse video below...
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