The Truth About Animals by Lucy Cooke

Author:Lucy Cooke [COOKE, LUCY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2018-04-17T00:00:00+00:00

This Italian medical manual (1642) credits the hippopotamus as the inventor of phlebotomy. The animal (said to be the “size of a Friesian horse”) instinctively pierces a vein, lets out blood “until it feels revived” and then wallows in the mud until the wound is healed. How terribly hygienic.

The slime’s bloodlike appearance is the product of red and orange pigments, unstable polymers that start out clear but change shape and color as they absorb and reflect UV light. This is rather handy, because it means the hippo is essentially secreting its very own sunblock—an evolutionary adaptation for a massive, hairless mammal regularly exposed to the blazing sub-Saharan sun.

The slime is also believed to contain antibacterial agents—the reason why a hippo’s war wounds hardly ever get infected despite its predilection for wallowing in water awash with its own feces. And despite their fondness for a poo party, flies tend to leave the hippo alone, suggesting this supergoop could be an insect repellent to boot.

This three-in-one formula is significantly more sophisticated than your average overpriced sun-slop from Walgreens. In fact, it’s such a revolutionary substance that Christopher Viney, a biomimicry scientist in California, has been trying to turn hippo sweat into the next big thing in sunscreen. “It is the unusual combination of properties that makes it so enticing: sunblock, bug repellent, and antiseptic all rolled into one,” he told me.

“Nature’s most successful materials have had plenty of time to become optimized for purpose. If Nature makes a good skincare product, we will be hard-pressed to improve on it,” said Viney.

There are some issues to be worked out. “The challenge,” he noted, “is to get a sample that is not contaminated by feces.”

Undeterred, I decided to put the professor’s research to the test by smearing my own skin with fresh hippo slime. The hippo in question was an overly tame orphaned baby called Emma, resident of a rescue center in South Africa. I was feeding her when I noticed rivers of red running down her back and collecting in the folds of fat on her neck. So I decided to help myself.

The liquid had the tacky consistency of egg whites and lathered up into a creamy foam; on application, my skin quickly absorbed it. Sadly my hands were so sun worn it was hard to deduce its SPF powers, but one hand was now noticeably silkier than the other. The owner of the sanctuary was also a fan of its moisturizing qualities; she told me she regularly uses hippo goo as a lip salve and swears by it.

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