This is scientific Americans 60 second science. I'm Jason Goldman. Got a minute?

Hipopodimuses. People usually think of them as massive lumbering hulks of plant-eating muscle.

Reports do crop up of hippos snacking on crocks or chowing down on a drowned wildebeast,

but those anecdotes are often dismissed as aberrant behaviors.

Opportunistic protein snacks added to a diet made mostly of salad.

But it turns out that hungry-hungry hipp intentionally seek out the sweet, sweet taste of animal flesh.

We saw a bunch of wild dogs came and attacked an impala and the impala jumped into the water, tried to swim across the little lake and the hippo killed it.

Then a few minutes later that that hippo and a bunch of other hippos started eating on that

impala. University of Alaska researcher Joseph P Dudley was in Zimbabwe

studying elephants when he saw this scene play out more than 20 years ago.

About that time the wild dogs caught and killed another impala right next to the edge of the

water hole and and three hippos came out of the water and tried to take away the carcass of the impala,

the antelope from the wild dogs.

As far as I had ever heard, hippos didn't do either of those facts.

We now know that carnivore is actually common among hippos, and meat eating could explain

what's been a hippo public health mystery.

Anthrax outbreaks happen naturally among African herbivores,

but the pattern of anthrax transmission in hippos has always puzzled researchers.

Could they hankering for meat explain it?

Dudley's latest research suggests that the hippos could owe their unique susceptibility to anthrax die-offs

to their practice of eating meat that carries the infection, including the bodies of other dead hippos.

The study is in the journal Mammal Review and that means that humans who come into contact with

...