By Victoria Bisset
A one-year-old child was killed and 23 people were reported missing after a hippopotamus charged and capsized a canoe in southern Malawi, police said.
Thirty-seven people were travelling across the Shire River to neighbouring Mozambique when the animal hit their boat on Monday, according to the Associated Press.
A spokeswoman for the Nsanje District police, Agnes Zalakoma, told the AP that the missing people were feared dead because more than 24 hours had passed.
The incident has brought renewed attention to the risks of human-hippo encounters. While hippos are often adored and considered a star attraction in some zoos, they have also been described as one of the world's deadliest mammals, capable of snapping a canoe in half with its jaws, according to the National Geographic.
"Hippos do not actually kill more people in Africa than other large animals, but the biting and trampling trauma of hippo attacks can result in serious human injury and/or death.
“Many attacks occur where people simply stumble into hippos at night (when hippos leave the water to graze),” Lochran Traill, a lecturer at the University of Leeds in Britain, said in emailed comments Wednesday.
“Where people farm and fish near rivers or lakes, and where hippos live in those rivers, then conflict will happen,” Traill said, adding that many human fatalities appear to be related to drowning.
Though they're vegetarian, hippos can grow up to 14 feet long (about 4m) and weigh as much as four tons. They have been known to attack people across their habitat in sub-Saharan Africa, from fishermen in Senegal and a toddler in Uganda, to locals and tourists in Kenya.
They’ve even caused trouble as far away as Colombia, after drug kingpin Pablo Escobar smuggled four of the animals into his country estate in the 1980s - leaving the country's authorities struggling to control the world's largest invasive species.
Malawi’s Minister of Water and Sanitation Abida Mia, travelled to the area of the capsized canoe on Tuesday. Mia said that locals told her that hippos often cause problems and that they want authorities to relocate some of the animals, according to the AP.
So why might a hippo charge at a boat - and what can you do to stay safe if you're within a hippo's territory?
Hannah Lacy, a PhD student at the University of Leeds who is studying the animal's spatial ecology, said that male hippos are "extremely territorial in water" and that "boats may provoke hippos to attack as they will be considered a threat."
If you're in a hippo's territory, the advice is to never come between the animal and water, because hippos see deep water as a place of refuge and don't like seeing something between them and safety.
It's also worth making plenty of noise if travelling by boat, for example by knocking the oars or paddles against the side of the vessel, to give the hippo enough time to move out of the way. Mother hippos will be particularly protective of their calves.
There are simple measures that people sharing an environment with hippos can take, such as placing barriers or trenches around crops or leaving designated areas for the animals' use, Traill said, but he warned that conflict between humans and hippos “will not end soon”.
“Unfortunately, many people in countries like Malawi are poor and depend on the food they grow and fish they catch. Often the best soils for crops, or fishing opportunities, also happen to be where hippos live.”
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