The pygmy hippopotamus is a small forest hippo from West Africa that usually lives alone.
Compared with a common hippo, its legs are proportionally longer, its feet less webbed, and its eyes are not on top of the head.
Pygmy hippos use riversides, wet places and surrounding vegetation as well as forests. In the Gola region on the Sierra Leone–Liberia border, tracks and dung were also found in vegetation regrowing after cultivation.
A study combining field information collected during 2010–2014 confirmed animals or their signs in 128 of 525 surveyed one-square-kilometre cells. Researchers combined riverside searches, camera traps and forest transects. Some sites were visited after residents supplied information, and signs were subsequently confirmed there.
Most record locations were outside the protected-area boundaries used in the study. Different methods also revealed different surroundings: photographs and direct sightings were mostly in forest, while tracks and dung were also found in regrown farmland vegetation.
An extinction-risk assessment has not been added yet.
Habitat loss through logging, mining and agricultural expansion, together with hunting, creates conservation concerns. In Liberia during 2008–2012, ZSL worked with government and conservation partners to survey distribution and threats, and convened a regional conservation-strategy workshop in 2010. The Gola study’s authors recommended maintaining protected forests while also working with communities to conserve unprotected land, particularly wet areas along rivers.