 You're Pablo Escobar, world-renowned drug kingpin, seventh richest man in the world, DEA's most wanted, trying to relax on a Saturday afternoon. What do you do? Well, Netflix wouldn't be around for a few more years, and the Xbox hadn't yet been developed. So, what are you supposed to do with all your free time? Well, why not play with some hippos? Yep, that's exactly what he did. If you liked the video, don't forget to subscribe, and let's jump in. In the early 1980s, Pablo Escobar was the leader of the Medellin Cartel, dubbed the King of Cocaine. The cartel pulled in more than $70 million a day, totaling more than $22 billion a year. If the Medellin Cartel was a company today, that would put them just outside of the top 500 largest companies in the world by revenue, and the ninth largest in South America. But what do you do with all your wealth when you're one of the world's most wanted men? Well, you can't access most banks or financial markets without getting your assets seized by the Americans, and there are only so many Colombian companies you can buy. At their height, the Medellin Cartel was spending $2,500 a month on rubber bands just to keep their cash bundled together, and each year they lost more than $2 billion to hungry rats nibbling on the bills they had to hide throughout Colombia, again, since they couldn't keep most of it in banks. At a certain point, you just have to start spending money on random things, otherwise the rats will just have more to eat. So Escobar decided to take one of his mansions east of Medellin, and make the largest private zoo on the planet. He imported many animals, from giraffes to rhinos to zebras, and yes, even some hippos. Although there were some logistical challenges to importing hippos. For starters, their native homeland was some 5,000 miles and an ocean away. Not to mention, they can go up to 5 tons and every year kill more humans than any other mammal. Except for people, I guess. But Escobar was determined to make it happen. Luckily for him, his side business taught him a lot about smuggling things across borders, and he was able to sneak four hippos from California into the country. Over the years, Escobar enjoyed his zoo, and the hippos reportedly became his favorite animal. After Escobar's death in 1993, the Colombian government quickly seized his assets. When they came across the zoo, they began distributing the animals they found to other zoos across the country. Except for the rhinos and hippos, which they decided were too big and expensive to transport, and so they released them into their surrounding swamp land. The rhinos, which weren't as good at living in the Colombian wilderness, quickly died out, but the hippos started thriving. Without the big cats and hyenas that preyed upon them in Africa, their population grew. And seemingly opposed to the fight-fire-with-fire mentality, government officials didn't bring these apex predators to Colombia to keep the hippo populations in check. It might seem strange that the government decided to release these apex predators into the wilderness, but back in the 1990s, invasive species and the effects they could have on an ecosystem weren't as well understood as they are today. And honestly, they probably didn't think the hippos would survive very long so far from their natural habitat. Today, we know that invasive species can have an enormous effect on the ecosystems they encounter. Overall, invasive species like the cantoed in Australia and Asian carp in the US cause more than $100 billion in damages every year by killing native species, eating crops, damaging infrastructure and growing uncontrollably without their natural predators. And Pablo's hippos haven't turned out any different. A hippo eats more than 80 pounds of food a day, depleting resources from many native species like Colombia's native catfish and the endangered Amazonian manatee. Since they were first released, the hippo population in Colombia has grown rapidly and now sits at more than 50 from the original four just a few decades ago. With them tearing up the ecosystem and threatening the lives of the now many tourists who have started to come see them, how does one solve the hippo problem? Well, the easiest answer would be for the government to deal with the hippos the same way they dealt with Escobar. But in 2009, after hunters acting on government orders shot Pepe, one of Escobar's original hippos while he was rampaging through nearby farmland, animal rights activists sued the government. This led to a court ruling prohibiting hunting the hippos. With their enormous upkeep costs, remember, each one eats 80 pounds of food a day. No local zoos want them. The next obvious solution is to neuter them. The hippos will still be alive, but they won't be able to father any offspring, so it just turns into a long waiting game. A pretty long one. But as you can imagine, doing work down there isn't easy when the down there is attached to a 6,000 pound human eating machine. So neutering a hippo requires getting it away from the other hippos, tranquilizing it and then operating and all of these logistics aren't cheap. With local authorities strapped for cash by the time they neuter one, five more are born and sending them back to Africa isn't an option either. As you can imagine, going from 4 to 50 required a lot of inbreeding and officials aren't sure how their genes would affect the already delicate African herds. Their last option, authorities are currently trying to develop a birth control compatible for hippos, but so far this hasn't amounted to anything and those same animal rights groups that block their hunting probably won't like putting them on the pill. Things like these are why, in recent years, governments have been putting increasing restrictions on transporting foods and animals across borders, but as global markets become ever more connected, it seems invasive species are inevitable. After all, it only takes a few slipping through the cracks to cause big problems. A perfect example happened in Australia in 1857 when a handful of European rabbits were released into the wild for hunting before ballooning into more than 600 million a century later. Even with costly measures taken in the last few decades, their population still sets at around 100 million today. Only time will tell what will happen to Escobar's hippos, but for now this is where our story ends. I hope you liked the video and if you did, consider watching the one tagged in the outro. Have a great day and remember, there is always more to learn.