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This is Scientific Americans' 60-second science. I'm Jason Goldman. They weigh about 3,000 pounds and eat about 100 pounds of plants each day. So your average adult hippo produces quite a lot of poop. By some estimates, a single hippo blasts out more than 10 pounds of waste each day. And all that hippodung gets mixed

into the ponds and streams where they spend most of their time. We generally think of this process

as beneficial, an ecosystem service, a way for nutrients to flow from terrestrial streamside ecosystems

into the water itself.

Their dung is a sort of fertilizer for aquatic life.

And all of that is true, at least when water moves from pond to pond.

At one time, many African waterways continued to flow even during the dry season.

But people have diverted lots of that water for agriculture.

So now Tanzania's great Ruaha River stops flowing during the dry season, leaving behind

a series of stagnant pools in which the hippos keep on pooping.

Especially in these high density pools, the peak of the dry season, there's a huge buildup

of dung. So we ended up just pulling out these nets that have no fish but are just

filled with hippodung. University of California Santa Barbara ecologist, Kenan Steers.

Unable to wash down river, the nutrients build up while dissolved oxygen in the water decreases.

And changes in the chemistry can influence biodiversity within these pools as well.

So specifically fish as well as aquatic invertebrates.

Only a few types of fish can survive in these oxygen-poor aquatic environments for more than a few weeks.

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