The adult bull is a massive animal standing four and a half feet tall and weighing over 1,600 pounds. Males are brown and females are russet colored and smaller. They congregate in herds of a hundred animals or more. [I 002 / Buffalo] are found all over the ecosystem except for the short-grass plains. Their broad muzzles are adapted for eating tall stock grass, not short grass.
Like the wildebeest, the buffalo is a ruminant. However, because it is about twice the size of the wildebeest, it relies on quantity rather than quality to obtain nutrients - unlike the wildebeest which requires a higher quality of vegetation. The buffalo population rapidly increased, as did that of the wildebeest, during the decade following the eradication of [G 40 / rinderpest]. During the 1980s, poaching took a heavy toll on the population, however today poaching has been reduced and the population has stabilized.
