– credit, Tanganyika Wildlife Park, via TikTok
At a zoo in Kansas, keepers were having trouble with a slippery, recalcitrant, baby pygmy hippopotamus who didn’t want to get out of the pool.
It’s something they deal with every day, but in a viral video shared by the zoo, they demonstrate the best way to resolve the situation: calling his mother.
It amassed 4.6 million views on TikTok, and thousands of comments pointing out that Posie, the mother hippo, arrives and gives her son Mars the “mom stare.”
In the video, zookeepers are seen attempting to muscle Mars out of the pool so he can go inside a shelter in his enclosure for the night. The slippery devil continues to escape them and run back into the pool.
Tanganyika Wildlife Park’s staff explained to Today.com that baby hippos are covered in a slimy secretion called “blood sweat” which forms a protective layer around the newborn’s skin to shield it from the Sun’s rays.
“So between his size and that secretion, it’s really hard to pick him up and just carry him inside. So we found that we can call mom back out, or if mom is getting impatient because she wants to go inside, she’ll turn around and give kind of small little grunts,” said Curator of Research and Welfare, Dr. Samantha Russak.
Why might mom get impatient? Although Mars is nursing and so can eat when he wants, Posie eats in the early evening inside their shelter, so the longer that Mars stays in the pool, the longer Posie has to wait to eat.
BEST OF BABY ANIMALS:
Whether it was third time she announced that “dinner’s ready,” whether she gave him the “mom stare” as some in the comments suggested, whether she used all three of his names, or whether she started counting to three, the effect she has in the video is just so recognizable.
“It seems to be universal. Moms everywhere just have that power over babies. I saw someone comment and say, ‘She must have used his full three names.’”
“The ‘mom stare’ is universal in every species,” one person wrote in the comment section.
WATCH the video below…
@tanganyikawildlifepark Better listen to mom! #babyhippo #hippobaby #marsthehippo ♬ Funny Song – Funny Song Studio & Thomas Hewitt Jones & Sounds Reel
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