This is the horrific moment a massive crocodile devours a newborn hippo as it flails around in its jaws.
The helpless hippo still has its umbilical cord attached as the crocodile bites down into its flesh.
Frankie Adamson, a wildlife photographer who was working as the resident photographer for the safari operator Governors’ Camp Collection, filmed the incident from the banks of Kenya’s Mara River.
Vividly describing how the horror encounter unfolded, Ms Adamson says there were no other hippos in this section of the river.
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After snatching the baby hippo, the crocodile initially stayed in the water, but it began tossing the corpse about when it was disturbed by catfish.
“It started lifting the carcass up out of the water and very violently thrashing it around,” the photographer told Live Science.
“The crocodile already had the baby hippo held in its jaws by the time I approached, and I was fairly certain it was already dead,” she recalled.
“This raised questions in my mind as to whether the crocodile had killed it, or whether it had been stillborn and the carcass snatched as I later saw the baby’s umbilical cord still attached.”
The croc held on to the calf for 45 minutes before swimming off with its prey, Ms Adamson said.
It’s a rare sighting – crocodiles do not tend to bother adult hippopotamuses.
However, Ms Adamson says this croc might have viewed the calf as an easy catch, given its size and inexperience in the hostile environment.
As the video horror shows, crocodiles violently shake their prey to kill them, before tearing them to pieces to digest them easily.
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In the footage, the crocodile chomps down on the calf’s hind leg before yanking it below the surface.
Growing to around 16 feet (five meters), Nile crocodiles would make light work of a baby hippo.
However, a mother hippo, which averages 16.5 feet (five meters) long and weighs up to 9,920 pounds (4,500 kilograms), can easily overpower and kill a croc
“It’s certainly not often that these ruthless and most efficient apex predators snatch baby hippos from their mothers โ in fact as opportunistic as crocodiles are โ they will often avoid hippos as they know just how aggressive an angry hippo can be,” Governors Camp Collection wrote in an Instagram post.
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