He’s less than two weeks old but the baby hippo born at the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden finally has a name.
Fiona’s baby brother has been named Fritz, WHIO reported.
Say hello to Fritz! More than 200,000 votes were received via a Jotform poll, and 56% preferred Fritz over Ferguson. The hippo keepers love the name and think it’s fitting since Bibi's birth control was apparently on the fritz. 😂 It also sounds good with Fiona! @Jotform pic.twitter.com/jNr0PhhmLi
— Cincinnati Zoo (@CincinnatiZoo) August 15, 2022
The zoo had whittled down the list to two finalists — Fritz and Ferguson — from thousands of suggestions from the public. The zoo had received 90,000 suggestions from every state in the U.S. and more than 60 countries. When it came to voters, there were 223,542, with more than 125,000 choosing Fritz, zoo officials said.
“We would have been happy with either name, but we really think the name Fritz fits this spunky little guy’s personality,” Wendy Rice, the zoo’s head hippo keeper, said in a statement. “We also thought it was funny that it was suggested because ‘Fritz’ is here due to Bibi’s birth control being ‘on the fritz’.”
Fritz and Bibi still have bonding time out of the spotlight, but soon they will be slowly introduced into the hippo habitat for an introduction to the group of hippopotamuses, known as a bloat.
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