From Richard Reynolds

SAVE0160, originally uploaded by bucklesw1. Note the heavy anthropomorphic tone of this obituary. As most of you know, 50 years is sort of the high plateau for land mammal longevity. However, common (Nile) hippos rather regularly come close to and exceed it. The record seems to be that of a female who made 61 years and 2 months. She was born in Leipzig zoo in 1934 and died in Munich zoo in 1995. The old circus hippo Lotus made 51 years here in USA - -1903 to 1954. I saw her many times. Richard Reynolds PS — It seems that the baleen whales can reach unbelievable ages. I cite the following recent evidence: BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP - -June 2007) -- A 50-ton bowhead whale caught off the Alaskan coast last month had a weapon fragment embedded in its neck that showed it survived a similar hunt -- more than a century ago. Embedded deep under its blubber was a 3½-inch arrow-shaped projectile that has given researchers insight into the whale's age, estimated between 115 and 130 years old. This interesting tidbit was in the George Washington University Magazine, I received in the mail yesterday. The caption of a photo of a bronze hippo on campus reads in part: “Legend has it that hippos once frolicked in the Potomac River to the delight of George and Martha Washington, who watched them from the porch at Mount Vernon. Hippos were credited with bringing fertility to the plantation and luck to anyone who could get close enough to touch one of the animal’s noses.” I lived in the DC area nearly 30 years and this is a new one for me. Bess Bess et al - - I'm afraid the George Washington University Magazine is way off base with that yarn about George and Martha Washington watching hippos frolicking in the Potomac. There was never a living hippo in USA until October 1860. That was a male named "Bucheet." He arrived in New York from Liverpool aboard the vessel City of Manchester. In New York he was transferred to the steamship DeSoto for the voyage around Florida and on into the Gulf of Mexico for New Orleans. He was first put on public display there on November 1, 1860 in a museum operated by Gilbert R. Spalding and Charles J. Rogers. I told this entire story in "America's First Hippo" AZA, Regional Conference Proceedings, 1996. George Washington died in 1799 and wife Martha in 1802 - -both having been dead by some 60 years before the arrival of America's first hippo. When George and Martha were both still living, exotic animals were only beginning to come to America. Before George W. died we had seen only the lion (1720), dromedary camel (1721), polar bear (1733), leopard (1768), orangutan (1789), and ostrich (1794). The first hippos to reach Europe since the time of the Romans were - - - (1) a living example around 1677-1700 in the menagerie of Cosimo de Medici III, the Grand Duke of Tuscany at the Giardino di Boboli in Florence. [See: Liv Emma Thorsen (Oslo) in Museologia scientifica (2006)], and; (2) the celebrated Obaysch who arrived at the London zoo in 1850, the first ever in what we would call a modern zoo. It does not seem to trouble the GW Univ. legend that for a hippo to cavort in the Potomac, someone had to bring it to the USA and do so for a purpose. At the time the only folks bringing in exotics were sea captains seeking to turn a dollar or two by selling them to showmen. And, in time, the showmen themselves imported them for exhibition in vauxhall type exhibits, museums of curiosities or traveling animal shows. The last named moved about playing at the likes of taverns, public halls, farmers' barns, or town squares where, for a small charge, one could see the living curiosity. Now, America's first hippo did indeed once cavort in a river. That in 1863. However, it was the Detroit, not the Potomac. The animal got loose from its enclosure on a ship or barge moving toward the City of Detroit. It was recaptured in time and finally died on July 7, 1867 at Seeley's Bay Canada. Richard Oops! - -Don't know how I could have overlooked it but that list of early arrivals omitted the biggest attraction of all - - Asian elephant (1796). Richard Reynolds