#red sweat

[red-vogue]

[shouiyo]

[learningsomethingnew2011]

The Hippopotamus Who Sweat Red

January 19, 2011

Sounds like a good title for a children's book doesn't it?

I was watching NCIS last night and Bob Newhart was guest starring as a retired medical examiner with Alzheimers. Newhart's character noticed a stuffed hippo and remarked that hippopotami sweat was red. Today, I looked it up, and lo and behold, it's true.

I learned a few more things about the hippo today (beyond the fact that it is a pain to type out everything that follows the first "o") including that it is related to the pig. It seems that it eats all night and then spends the day in the mud digesting, shielded from the heat and the sun. It may be related to me as well.

Back to their red sweat, which apparently freaked out the Greeks because they thought it was sweating blood. The secretions, according to the BBC News, is comprised of two unstable pigments - one red, the other orange. The red pigment has antibacterial properties, which work to protect the hippo from certain pathogens and accelerate its recovery from wounds, as well as act as a sunscreen.

"The sunscreen property of the sweat was first suspected because albino hippos are often observed - and they seem healthy," Kyoto's Kimiko Hashimoto told BBC News Online.

Hippos are always fighting, getting cut up and they don't get infections apparently from their naturally secreting antiseptic.

"It would be nice to also try and replicate the antiseptic and insect-repellent characteristics of the sweat, to obtain a four-in-one product: sunscreen, sunblock, antiseptic, insect repellent," Christopher Viney, a professor in the School of Engineering at the University of California, Merced, told Discovery News.

That's what I learned today, the 19th of January, with 346 days to go in 2011.