The hippopotamus consumes a mostly herbivorous diet in the wild. Grasses, supplemented with nutrient-rich fruits, seem to make up the great majority of their food consumption; they also enjoy small shoots and reeds emerging from the ground, but aquatic plants seem to form a surprisingly small percentage of their diet. Pygmy hippos, by contrast, eat a higher proportion of leaves and roots than grasses. On rare occasions, common hippos have been observed eating dead animals, but there's some debate about how often this actually occurs in the wild.