Water buffalo

Where does the water buffalo live?

Home: Wet fields, rice paddies and river banks.

In the wild it lives in these countries: India, Pakistan, China, Nepal, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand.

The short profile

Fully grown: about 300 to 550 kg. It weighs about 500 kilograms. On the menu: plants.

The story behind it

People began keeping water buffalo thousands of years ago, and in much of Asia the working day still starts with one. Their wide, splayed hooves spread the weight so that they do not sink into deep mud where a tractor would get stuck. Buffalo have very few sweat glands and cannot cool themselves the way a horse does, so they lie in water or mud for hours; the mud dries into a crust that keeps biting flies and sunburn away. Farmers keep two kinds. River buffalo are milk animals and prefer clean, deep water, while swamp buffalo mostly work in the fields and dig their own mud holes with their horns. Buffalo milk carries about twice as much fat as cow milk, which is why it makes such creamy yoghurt and the mozzarella that goes on pizza. Most of the world’s buffalo live in India and Pakistan. The wild water buffalo they descend from still survives, but only a few thousand are left.

Find it on the globe

Water buffalo is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.

It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.