“The Politics of Invasiveness: A Research Route to Track the Controversy of Hippopotamuses Living in Colombia’s Wild” is a talk I will present on September 4 at the panel “Towards Pluriversal Urbanisms: Reimagining Postcolonial and More-than-human Futures” during the 2025 meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S).
This is an orphan research—a stand-alone, unfunded line of inquiry I’m pursuing because it is both significant and urgently contemporary. In Colombia’s Magdalena River basin, hippopotamuses—descendants of animals once kept at Pablo Escobar’s private zoo—now roam wetlands, graze riverbanks, and collide with everyday life. Their presence has been recently designated as “exotic invasive,” a label that does far more than classify an animal; it reorganizes law, policy, science, media narratives, and local livelihoods. Here I sketch how I plan to follow this controversy ethnographically, and why it matters now.
The Magdalena is Colombia’s main fluvial artery, stretching from the Andes to the Caribbean. It carries sediment, commerce, and stories; manatees, otters, and migratory birds live here—and, improbably, hippos. A small group left behind in the 1990s found abundant water, rich vegetation, and no predators. A curiosity became a population. Encounters multiplied: fishers startled on night rivers, children both fascinated and afraid, tourists arriving for a glimpse, scientists sounding ecological alarms, authorities grappling with management nightmares. In this tangle, hippos have become political beings, and “invasiveness” is a contested category rather than a neutral scientific fact.
The invasive-species designation is a turning point. On paper, it is technical; in practice, it legitimizes specific state actions (from sterilization to possible culls), draws animal-welfare groups into the fray, and amplifies the international media’s appetite for “narco-hippo” spectacle. For riverine communities, meanwhile, hippos are neighbors—dangerous, yes, but folded into everyday geographies and, at times, local pride. Different registers speak past one another: ecological evidence about eutrophication and bank erosion, ethics of killing versus care, livelihoods and safety, tourism economies, and national image. The outcome is not settled; the label itself is doing political work.
My project follows this controversy across sites and scales. First, it traces histories and presences—from Escobar’s zoo to the basin’s floodplains—treating hippos not only as animals but as actors entangled with law, media, and governance. Second, it examines the politics of labeling: how “invasive species” travels between conservation biology, legal frameworks, and local imaginaries—and what is at stake when it sticks. Third, it develops ethnographic methods for more-than-human disputes, combining riverside fieldwork (stories, fears, jokes, daily adjustments), institutional and policy ethnography (how officials, scientists, and NGOs define and act on invasiveness), and media/discourse analysis (how hippos circulate as symbols of excess, danger, or place-making). This is a moving controversy; the research must move with it.
There are clear challenges. Safety is non-negotiable: hippos are territorial and can be lethal. Polarization complicates access and trust—scientists, officials, animal-welfare advocates, and residents often disagree sharply. Uncertainty looms: management strategies (sterilize, relocate, or cull?) remain unsettled, and climate and land-use changes are reshaping the basin itself. The task, then, is to document how futures are argued, imagined, and enacted in real time—how evidence is marshaled, how categories travel, and how care is claimed, refused, or redefined.
Why pursue an orphan research like this? Because the stakes exceed one charismatic species. The hippo controversy is a prism: it refracts questions at the core of environmental governance in the Global South—who bears risk, who counts as a stakeholder, how scientific authority meets lived expertise, and how multispecies relations get codified (or erased) in law. It asks what happens when the exotic becomes endemic, when management becomes spectacle, and when care and coercion intertwine. In short, it is a timely lens on how categories make worlds—and how worlds push back.