The hippopotamus calf born on Friday 28 March 2008 has been observed suckling and appears to be strong and healthy.

The calf is with its mother Primrose, aged 16, and five-year-old sister Tulip in their large pool, which is part of the award-winning new Kubu River Hippos development.

Father Harry, 30, is in a nearby pool, and another unrelated adult female Brindabella is also nearby.  

Senior Keeper Davin Kroeger says ‘Primrose has been a really great mother to Tulip, and it will be a good learning curve for Tulip to observe her mother raising a younger calf.  In hippopotamus pods, there is a very close bond between a mother and her female calf.’

The gestation period for this species is between 7.5 and 8 months, and the birth yesterday is the result of the introduction that Keepers arranged last winter.

These amazing creatures can spend long periods under water, and indeed mothers often give birth while in the water.  Recent research indicates that hippopotamus are more closely related to marine mammals than to other African land mammals.

In Africa, hippopotamus breed in the dry season so that their calves are born in the wet season, providing the optimum conditions for raising the calves with plenty of plants available for the mothers to graze.

At Werribee Open Range Zoo, the hippos have year-round access to a chain of pools containing 5 million litres of water, in a self-contained system kept healthy by a world-first biological filtration process in adjacent wetlands.

The Kubu River Hippos development was modeled on the Okavango Delta in Botswana.

Hippopotamus were once widespread in Africa’s rivers, but the illegal bushmeat trade has severely impacted hippopotamus populations, so the species has recently been classified as under threat in the wild.