Big sweat as human hippo Brady Barr gets stuck in mud

A scientist has gone undercover in a 14-stone armoured hippopotamus suit in Zambia to mingle unremarked with pods of the feared mammals.

Dr Brady Barr, who returned from his mission last week, adopted the disguise in an attempt to harvest sweat samples from hippos in the quest for a new type of sun cream.

The suit, designed by a taxidermist from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, consists of a steel-ribbed tube wrapped in bulletproof material and topped with mouldings taken from a female hippo.



“I have long believed that hippo sweat can provide breakthroughs in waterproof sunblock and antiseptics,” said Barr. “It works for them in some of the harshest environments in the world; it could work for us. But extracting it did not prove to be as easy as we hoped.”

Most of the weight in Barr’s suit is in the body armour. It is able to withstand a bite three times as powerful as that of a great white shark. Hippos cause more human deaths than any other animal in Africa.

When reassembled in the African bush, the suit was finished off with a daubing of mud and dung to disguise the scent of the scientist staggering beneath it to the riverbank to await a passing hippo. Barr’s plan was then to open a flap, tap a hippo with a long pole and scoop off fresh drops of its sweat. His mission failed but, Barr said, “we shall be going back to Africa as soon as we can”.