In March 2014, a team of robotics engineers from Carnegie Mellon University came to the Mara to help us finally learn what is at the bottom of a hippo pool. In order to understand some patterns we see in river water quality, we needed to know how deep hippo pools are, and how deep the layer of hippo feces is at the bottom. However, hippo pools are very dangerous for people to access, given the territorial and aggressive nature of their inhabitants. CMU engineers from the company Platypus volunteered to help us out, by coming to the field with several of their robotic boats to survey the pools for us. To improve the chances of survival for the boat, we disguised it as a crocodile. Everything went really well, although there were some exciting moments along the way. Read some of the coverage we have received for this exciting project at the following links…