Where Do Pygmy Hippos Live? West African Forests and Swamps

Which countries do pygmy hippos live in?

The pygmy hippopotamus has one of the smallest ranges of any large African mammal. Its stronghold is Liberia, which still has large blocks of lowland rainforest and is thought to hold most of the remaining wild animals.

Outside Liberia, pygmy hippos are known from:

• Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), especially in and around Taï National Park in the southwest of the country.
• Sierra Leone, including the Gola Rainforest National Park near the Liberian border.
• Guinea, in the forested southeast, where only small numbers are thought to survive.

The species has disappeared from Nigeria and may also have vanished from Guinea-Bissau. In Nigeria, a separate population lived in the Niger Delta, more than 1,800 km (1,100 mi) east of the main range and separated from it by the Dahomey Gap, a belt of savanna that splits West Africa’s forests. Sometimes treated as a distinct subspecies, it has not been reliably recorded since the 1940s and is probably extinct.

What kind of habitat do pygmy hippos need?

Pygmy hippos are forest animals, unlike the common hippopotamus, which lives in open rivers and lakes surrounded by grassland. They need three things close together:

• Water to rest in by day. Their skin dries out and cracks quickly, so they lie up in small rivers, forest streams, swamps and muddy wallows. Some use hollows or burrow-like spaces under riverbanks.
• Dense cover to hide in. Thick undergrowth and swamp forest protect them from predators and people.
• Forest food. At night they follow well-worn trails to browse on ferns, broad-leaved plants, shoots, roots and fallen fruit.

They are mostly found in lowland forest, below the hills and mountains of the region. Because they need permanent water and undisturbed forest, they are absent from large areas that have been cleared for farms, plantations and settlements.

How do pygmy hippos use their home range?

Pygmy hippos live alone or in pairs, usually a male and female or a mother and calf. Field studies in the wild suggest that males use a home range of about 1.8 km² (0.7 sq mi), while females use smaller ranges of roughly 0.4–0.6 km² (0.15–0.23 sq mi). Ranges overlap, but animals that meet tend to ignore each other rather than fight.

An individual may rest in the same stretch of water for several days before moving to a new spot. Along the way it marks trails with dung, spreading it with rapid flicks of the tail so other pygmy hippos can recognize the path. Because they are so shy and nocturnal, most knowledge of how they move comes from tracks, dung and camera traps rather than direct sightings.

Important protected areas

Several national parks and reserves are key to the species’ survival:

Protection on paper does not always mean safety in practice. Rangers, research teams and local communities play a crucial role in stopping illegal logging, mining and hunting inside these areas.

How many pygmy hippos are left?

The IUCN Red List classes the pygmy hippo as Endangered and estimates that fewer than 2,500 mature individuals remain in the wild, with numbers still decreasing. Exact counts are impossible because the animals are so hard to see. By contrast, several hundred pygmy hippos live in zoos around the world in a coordinated breeding program, with the international studbook kept by Basel Zoo in Switzerland. For context on what these categories mean, see endangered animals.

What threatens the places where pygmy hippos live?

The main threat is the loss of their forest home. Across West Africa, large areas of rainforest have been logged and converted to farmland, oil palm and rubber plantations and settlements. Mining for iron ore, gold and diamonds also opens up forests, bringing roads and people into once-remote areas.

As forests shrink, the remaining pygmy hippos are split into small, isolated groups that cannot easily meet to breed, which reduces genetic diversity. Hunting for bushmeat is another serious problem, even though the species is legally protected. Civil wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Côte d’Ivoire in the 1990s and 2000s made conservation work extremely difficult, and for years nobody knew how the animals were faring. The camera-trap photos from Sapo National Park in 2008 showed that pygmy hippos had survived those troubled years, giving fresh hope for protecting them. To learn how big these forest hippos are, see How big is a pygmy hippo?