Colombia sterilizes 24 hippos on former estate of drug lord Escobar

[Judi Lynn]

3. It took a while, but I just found an article which says there were 4 original "water horses"!

Pablo Escobar's 'cocaine hippos' may be helping river ecosystems in Colombia
By Mindy Weisberger March 30, 2020

The hippo horde now numbers 80 animals or more.

Hippos that were brought to Colombia decades ago by Pablo Escobar, the notorious cocaine kingpin, are now thriving in the country's river ecosystems. Scientists even suspect that river habitats may benefit from the presence of these non-native hippos, with the large herbivores filling an ecological niche that has been vacant in the region for thousands of years.

Many species of big plant-eaters that once roamed the planet were driven to extinction beginning about 100,000 years ago, with extinctions peaking toward the end of the Pleistocene Epoch (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago). As big herbivorous animals vanished, their absence starved the soil of nutrients, altered plant growth and even affected water flow and availability, researchers wrote in a new study.

However, newly introduced nonnative herbivores — such as Escobar's "cocaine hippos" — could revitalize and enrich such ecosystems, and could do so in locations around the world, the scientists reported.

Escobar imported four hippos from America in 1981, for a private zoo at his hacienda near Medellín, Colombia. After his drug empire collapsed, the hippos escaped and have been breeding in the wild ever since, now numbering 80 individuals or more, Scientific American reported in February.

More:
https://www.livescience.com/cocaine-hippos-boost-colombian-ecosystem.html