The world’s first superstar hippo lives in a zoo in Thailand. Moo Deng shot to fame soon after she was born in July this year, thanks to viral videos that showed off her cute expressions and chirpy demeanour. Yet the story of her species is less happy, and reveals the close links between the extinction and climate change crises.
Moo Deng is a pygmy hippo, a species native to the forests of west Africa. Unlike their bigger and significantly scarier cousins (regular hippos), the pygmys are secretive creatures, who like to conceal themselves in swamps and dense vegetation.
Today, pygmy hippos are officially listed as endangered. Huanyuan Zhang-Zheng and Sulemana Bawa, conservationists at the University of Oxford, point out that 80% of their native forests have been lost. Just 2,500 remain in the wild.
