via Mostly Occasionally / iStockphoto
Here at BroBible, we’ve been tracking the cocaine hippos saga for a long time. I first wrote about them back in 2009 for AOL News, when there were just 27 of them living on Escobar’s estate. He’d imported four from Africa in the ‘80s, and without any natural predators in Colombia, the hippos were living their best lives. They bathed in artificial ponds at Hacienda Nápoles, a surreal narco-zoo-turned-family-theme-park complete with dinosaur statues and Escobar’s old Cessna plane mounted over the front gates.
But what started as a weird drug lord flex became a genuine ecological nightmare.
Four hippos became 27. Then dozens. Then hundreds. By 2019, scientists started sounding alarms about just how fast they were reproducing. By 2020, the problem got grosser: hippo waste was fueling toxic algae blooms in the Magdalena River. They eat all night, wade in the water all day, and basically turn rivers into sludge with all their poop.
By early 2023, one was involved in a deadly car crash. The government had no real plan as the problem escalated.
Then in mid-2023, the hippos started getting extradited. No, really.
El País reported that a conservationist in Mexico paid $450,000 to relocate 10 of Escobar’s hippos to the Ostok Sanctuary in Sinaloa, the same region where El Chapo ran his cartel. It was a classic case of wildlife diplomacy at its weirdest. More recently, Ostok’s founder Ernesto Zazueta claimed he’d found a sanctuary in India called Vantara, willing to take 60 more, with the eventual dream of returning some to Africa.
In September 2024, Colombia officially declared war on the hippos. A court gave the Ministry of Environment three months to submit a plan “that contemplates measures for the eradication of the species,” including sterilization and, yes, controlled hunting.
That’s where Forrest comes in.
“The official report reads 140 hippos. The reality is that there are over 200. They’re exploding. It’s exponential growth,” Forrest tells me on the newest episode of my The Mostly Occasionally Show.
You might know Forrest from his many Discovery Channel and Animal Planet shows, starting with Naked and Afraid back in 2013. Since then, he’s built a career chasing lost species, hosting Extinct or Alive, and turning the public eye toward wildlife conservation in a way that’s actually effective. He’s really damn good at it and has the scars and stories to prove it.
He just got back from a trip where he was boots on the ground in Colombia, helping to create a blueprint for what the heck to do about Escobar’s ever-expanding hippo problem.
“They’re genetically bottlenecked, they’re shitty specimens, and they’re killing people. I’ve nearly been killed by hippos. Twice,” he tells me. Watch the interview on YouTube here:
Forrest’s company, Phantasticus Pictures (which he co-owns with Eric Evangelista), is the only production house on the planet actively funding real conservation work in exchange for filming rights. So while his trip to Colombia was definitely about making great TV, it was also about protecting fragile ecosystems, helping solve the hippo crisis, and just getting sh*t done.
“We didn’t go down there to solve the hippo problem—because that would be lunacy—but to create a sustainable plan. Sterilize the juveniles, castrate the breeders, and relocate the ones we can,” he explains.
That last part is way harder than it sounds. Hippos don’t exactly take kindly to being wrangled. Forrest and his team used traditional African boma traps baited with watermelons and carrots. At one point, they caught two juveniles, chemically castrated them, and released them, only to have them warn the rest of the bloat. Hippos are smart like that.
“Next thing we know, no one’s going near the traps. Took two more weeks to get another one,” Forrest tells me.
Forrest has a new show on the way documenting this trip. It features wild charges, groundbreaking field surgeries, and a sobering look at what can happen when invasive species go unchecked for decades. Spoiler alert: it gets bad.
“They’re crushing endangered turtle nests. They’re shifting the entire Magdalena River ecosystem. And if we don’t act soon, 200 hippos will become 20,000. That’s ecological collapse.”
We also get into how Forrest is working with Vantara, a massive wildlife preserve in India created by Anant Ambani—the youngest son of billionaire businessman Mukesh Ambani—to potentially take in some of the hippos. Forrest has documented his visits there on his YouTube channel, showcasing the scale and ambition of what he calls “Noah’s Ark meets Elon Musk.”
The quick podcast dives deep into this issue and connects it to broader conservation headaches, like the wolf reintroduction battle in Colorado.
“Every invasive species problem needs its own custom-tailored plan. There’s no one-size-fits-all. Not with pythons, not with wolves, not with hippos.”
Watch the full episode on YouTube, or listen to it on Apple or Spotify, or in the player below.