https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03516-2

Environment ministry launches programme that also includes exporting and euthanizing the animals, which threaten the country’s biodiversity.

A hippo floats in the lagoon at Hacienda Napoles Park in Puerto Triunfo, Colombia, in 2022.

Wild hippos spend most of the day immersed in water and can be difficult to capture.Credit: Fernando Vergara/AP Photo/Alamy

Colombia has begun a new campaign sterilizing its invasive hippos, showing signs that it is taking the threat the animals pose to the country’s biodiversity and local communities seriously. The plan is to capture, anaesthetize and sterilize an initial 20 hippos by the end of 2023 as part of a three-pronged approach the government is taking to reduce the rapidly expanding population that has established itself along the country’s Magdalena River.

Colombia’s ‘cocaine hippo’ population is even bigger than scientists thought

The other prongs involve shipping hippos abroad to sanctuaries and zoos, and — more contentiously — culling some of the animals. Colombia’s environment minister, Susana Muhamad, announced the plan at a press conference on 2 November.

Earlier this year, researchers feared that Muhamad would not take the action needed to curb the hippo population after she met with animal-rights groups, created a new division of animal protection within the ministry, and the publication of a government-commissioned study on the hippos was delayed. Although some still have concerns, they are glad the ministry is taking action.

“There are questions around how all this will be carried out, particularly the euthanasia, but it seems that the government is generally going in the right direction,” says Jorge Moreno-Bernal, a biologist at the University of the North in Barranquilla, Colombia

Quora.com

In 2010, after the strong thaw in some areas of Siberia, Russia, a beautiful woolly mammoth calf weighing one ton was discovered. After 39,000 years in the ice, the calf was in perfect condition and still had its fur and muscle tissue intact. Thanks to the, Russian scientists, for the first time in history, we managed to take blood samples from a prehistoric animal.

According to research, the mammoth's death occurred while crossing the swamp, and due to the low temperatures and surrounding ice, the body remained in perfect condition.

Scientists and researchers from South Korea have suggested that thanks to the DNA samples obtained from Yuka's body, they could clone this extinct species in the future, giving life again to one of the great mammals in history.

Yuka was not the first mammoth found, in 1977 an excavator accidentally found the corpse of a small mammoth but unfortunately it was not well preserved