Everyone knows the lion is the king of the jungle. With its well-built body, great strength and speed, it is accepted as the undeclared king of the animal world, and most animals and birds of the forest tremble when it roars. But what if the "king" goes into the water? There, the lion's bluster counts for nothing. The lion may be king of the forest, but not of the water, where the hippopotamus rules. So a recently viral video suggests.

There is a Bengali proverb: "When an elephant falls into the mud, even a bat kicks it." It describes how, when someone very powerful is in trouble, even the powerless belittle or avoid them. The video of the lion and the hippos shows that this is not entirely unimaginable.

The video shows a lion sitting on a rock in a shallow river, with a group of hippos gathered around it, snorting with rage. Moments later one hippo charges the lion, opening its huge mouth to bite.

To save its life, the lion is forced to jump into the water and swims quickly to try to reach the bank. But halfway there, another hippo, which had been submerged, attacks and tries to lunge at the lion as it comes near.

Luckily, the "king of the jungle" manages to escape without serious harm. How it got onto the rock is not known. The video was uploaded on 15 March to a YouTube channel called Latest Sightings.

The incident reportedly took place in Kruger National Park in South Africa. The video became popular soon after it was shared, being viewed more than 21 lakh times in a single day, and nearly six hundred users commented on it.

One wrote that nature never stops amazing, and that a hippo attacking a lion is proof of nature's unpredictability.

Another wrote that it was frustrating not to see what had happened before: how did the lion get there?

A third wrote that the idea of the lion as "king of the jungle" is a human creation, not the animals'. In the wild, everyone lives with their life in their hands, and every hunter is prey to a bigger hunter.

According to the BBC, the hippopotamus is the world's deadliest large land mammal. An estimated five hundred people are killed by hippos in Africa every year. It is a very aggressive animal with very large, sharp teeth. Hippos spend most of their time in water to keep their skin cool, so they live where there is plenty of water.

With information from NDTV.

Source: Jagonews24. First published in Bengali on The Agro News.