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Casual Geographic

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Casual Geographic (Web Video)

Mamadou B. Ndiaye, also known as Casual Geographic or Hood Nature, is an animal commentator from New Jersey. He gives insights on animal facts and behavior while being serious as possible… and is known to make creative witty remarks on the animals he brings the topic of. He also uses Instagram and TikTok before editing the videos on his YouTube channel.

You can find his YouTube here, his Instagram, and TikTok.

In 2022, he released a book called 100 Animals That Can F*cking End You.


His videos provide examples of:

  • Angry, Angry Hippos: He frequently talks about hippos on the channel and how aggressive they can be, including discussing hippos killing smaller mammals that pose no threat to them. In one video, he makes no qualms with the fact that if a hippo has its sights on punching your ticket, your number on life has already come up.
  • Artistic License – Biology: Frequently brought up. He will discuss animal behavior that is accurately or inaccurately portrayed in media. Some examples include:
    • Killer whales will not eat humans, but they will eat moose. That said, this is very rare and hardly a regular occurrence, so the claim orcas are natural predators of moose is itself an example of this trope.
    • Hyenas are not scavengers as depicted in most media like The Lion King. They are actually effective hunters; it's typically the lions that steal from hyenas, and even then, usually requiring more than one of them, considering the size of hyena clans. They are also much more closely related to cats than dogs, as most media would have you believe.
    • Ring-tailed lemurs are actually a female-dominant species rather than male, meaning Julian in Madagascar would have been a queen instead of a king if it were scientifically accurate.
    • Meerkats are in fact one of, if not the animal with the highest likelihood to commit homicide against their own kind. If it were scientifically accurate, just the segment with Timon's family in The Lion King 1 ½ alone would have launched the movie right into R-rated territory even without the threat of the hyenas.
    • Bears are not true hibernators, since hibernation means an animal under power-save mode, and not literally sleep for the entire winter, since some bears will wake up during winter. Instead, they have something called torpor where they'll nurse even newborn cubs in their sleep.
  • Ascended to Carnivorism: The topic of the video "The One Rule of Nature School Never Taught You".
    Mamadou: Most herbivores are about as vegetarian as their options.
  • Awesome, but Impractical:
    • Did you see a really cute animal you want to have as a pet? Well, this guy explains why such animals are not a good idea to have as a pet, namely they're all high-maintenance and most of them bite.
    • He even sees the megalodon this way, since they were large apex predators that "became a was" because there isn't enough food to sustain them. Additionally, since they were surface dwellers (as in they swim near the surface of the ocean), they would had left a body if they still existed now. Other marine biologists agree with his stance.
  • Badass Pacifist: Mamadou brings up the story of Waffles, a female hyena who started at the bottom of her clan's social structure and worked her way to the top purely by making friends and having the right connections, with no infighting involved.
  • Bait-and-Switch: He loves to make these kinds of comments. Some of them would reek of Does This Remind You of Anything?, only to clarify what he's actually talking about.
    Mamadou: Pigeons like these originated from dark red over there– (showing a map of northern Africa, Europe, and Middle East) –so every pigeon in New York is our fault. We brought them to America for work, freed them, and then let them fend for themselves. And now fast forward, we're mad at them for existing… [Beat] We're still talking about pigeons.
  • Bears Are Bad News:
    • He will often explain why certain bears are bad news. Polar bears, for example, are the prime example of this trope, given they actively hunt humans if given the choice. Averted for black bears — they're just as capable of carnage as a polar or grizzly, but they can also be very calm around humans so long as they're getting food, with one clip even showing a black bear literally sitting down at a picnic table with a group.
    • As much as he disses on the panda bear for not technically being a species of bear (i.e. in the Ursus genus), they're still bears at heart. For example, a panda once mangled a man's leg so badly, doctors declared it damaged beyond repair and had to amputate it. Another incident involved a man in a panda suit that tried to get close, and the panda bear responded by attacking him. And they're shown to eat deer and peacocks and not just bamboo.
  • Beat Without a "But": Mamadou has this to say when discussing Sandra Herold who owned a chimpanzee named Travis that went on a rampage in 2009:
    Mamadou: Now, a lot of people blame Sandra for the event… and I'm one of them.
  • Bestiality Is Depraved: Inverted, oddly enough.
    • ''The Science Behind Why Birds Find Us Attractive'' is about how birds initiate "doin' the nasty" with humans and how it has actually been useful in restoring bird populations by collecting their genetic material in various ways and other forms of avian husbandry.
    • On a less practical note, male orangutans are noted to sometimes grow attracted to human women and force themselves upon said women, necessitating that ovulating women either stay out of the area entirely or walk around with a club-like weapon for self-defense.
  • Better to Die than Be Killed: Referred to as his "one-shot rule" in "Every Bear and Its Chances of Retiring You From Life", for certain animal attacks where if he had one bullet left, he'd shoot himself because that would be a better death than whatever the animal would do to him.
  • Beware the Nice Ones: Capybaras may be the nicest things on Earth and are willing to chill with anything from turtles to crocodiles, but even they have their limits. Mamadou points out cappies don't mind being fed by humans and being near them, but if they're showing warning signs and you still get up close, you're liable to get bitten.
  • Black and Nerdy: He explains the reason he took interest in researching animals is due to reading Zoobooks as a kid, and his first computer game was Zoo Tycoon. He also had a book that plays animal sounds and wanted to be a zookeeper when he grew up.
  • Body Horror:
    • How often do you hear about fish mating, and fusing with their mate? He goes into detail that, yes, this is how anglerfish mate, wherein the larger female will typically have multiple mates fused with her.
    • Blobfishes do not look like blobs in general; they only look like blobs because when they get pulled to the surface, decompression kicks in, resulting in its well-known look above the surface.
  • Breather Episode: After revealing some horrifying and gruesome animal facts, he'll dial back to the wholesomeness of the videos by showing an animal (or animals) being Good Parents, showing how adorable some of the babies are, and even show non-aggressive interactions with the animal and humans.
  • Butt-Monkey:
    • Seals are the butt-monkey in the ocean, considering almost every other animal hunts them.
    • Octopuses are a close second place, given that they have their own long list of predators on top of having insultingly short lifespans (roughly just a few years, if that) and dying shortly after they reproduce. Specifically, the males quickly rot away via senescence and the females stuck giving their lives for their offspring.
    • Caimans (crocodilian reptiles related to alligators, crocodiles, and gharls) are considered the most disrespected reptiles in the animal kingdom due to the fact that every other animal always goes for its head/neck area.
    • About half of the video on coyotes is detailing how nearly everything that lives and breathes hates them. Wolves, ravens, eagles, bears, cougars, alligators, mobs of raccoons, donkeys, rheas, and other coyotes will either kill them or steal their food, and humans have spent decades on an unsuccessful plan to exterminate the species. The only partial exception is the badger, which sometimes hunts and plays with them, but kills their pups at other times.
    • He goes into depth on how cheetahs are practically bullied by nearly everything in the savannah, and describes them as "a cat who just can't cat".
    • Sloth bears are something between this and Cornered Rattlesnake. They're one of the only bears to be a regular prey species, being hunted by tigers, leopards, and dholes, and bullied by most herbivores. Because of this, they are far more aggressive than other bears, with a tendency to tear their victims' faces off and the highest per capita kill count of any bear species.
  • Cain and Abel: Some species of animal will have a very intense Sibling Rivalry, to the point of killing each other whether they are related or not.
    • Hyenas, despite their own loyalty to their packs, will start attacking their younger siblings when their mother is out hunting.
    • Sharks will eat their own siblings inside their mother's womb; this is called 'adelphophagy'.
    • Some invasive birds will leave their eggs inside of the nest of another bird to the point that upon hatching, the invasive chicks will actually kill their adoptive siblings to the point the mother won't realize her own chicks were killed; this is called 'brood parasitism'.
  • Captain Obvious: In "Ridiculous Survival Tips that you might actually need (Parts 6-10)", after the first seven parts had involved Mamadou giving actual safety advice, Part 8 consists of this.
    Mamadou: If you ever get caught in a rip current, make sure you keep your head above water at all times. Inhaling too much water can actually cause you to drown to death.
    Mamadou: Unlike cockroaches and chickens, a polar bear actually can't survive without its head, and will be unable to attack you.
    Mamadou: The inland taipan is one of the most venomous snakes in the entire world, so the best way to survive an attack is to avoid getting bit.
  • Catchphrase:
    • "I should probably explain what the hell that is", often used when he opens a video with a clip of a very bizarre-looking animal or animals engaging in extremely questionable deeds.
    • His various Deadly Euphemisms are used so frequently that they very much count as this.
  • Censored for Comedy: By his own admission when showing Body Horror when discussing crocodiles (viewer discretion advised).
    Mamadou: Happy ####### Halloween! …I didn't even curse, I did gag a little.
  • Chill Capybara:
    • In "Top 10 Most Wholesome Animals (in my very biased opinion)", Mamadou lists the capybara as the second most wholesome animal to him (just behind the manatee) for being mostly peaceful despite being often surrounded by their predators in their natural habitat, as well as acting as foster parents for baby animals not at all closely related to them in captivity. He also notes that as rodents, they have sharp teeth that they can use to defend themselves, but believes that anyone who manages to aggravate a capybara probably deserves to be bitten anyway.
    • "The Science Behind the Unproblematic Nature of the Capybara" follows up on the above assessment by dissecting capybara evolution and ecology in general, eventually concluding that the reason they are so "chill" in the first place is due to them being large, bulky, social animals that practise alloparenting (i.e. being willing to raise babies that aren't their own). For the latter, Mamadou brings up the case of Cheesecake, a capybara that was adopted and raised by dogs in captivity and goes on to be a foster mother for puppies and all sorts of baby animals. However, he also adds in the video that capybaras still often have intraspecific conflicts when it comes to mating, and thus aren't always "chill", and wouldn't make good pets despite their generally peaceful temperaments.
  • The Comically Serious: He says almost everything with a completely straight face and a serious tone of voice. Which makes it more funny. That said, he's not immune to corpsing.
  • Content Warnings: Parodied when he tells a story about a spectacled bear that escaped from a Berlin zoo and went straight for the children's area. He describes it as one of the most gruesome displays ever caught on camera and advises viewer discretion before showing the results of the bear's rampage: a picture of the bear examining a bicycle. He then explains that the spectacled bear is pretty chill for a bear and only has one human mortality to its name, and that was when a human shot one out of a tree and was killed by the falling body.
  • Corpsing: In-Universe. While he really tries his hardest to be serious as possible, Mamadou occasionally slips up and laughs. Especially when it's a joke or phrase he said or the uncommon occasion where he gets his information wrong.
  • Deadly Euphemism: He uses phrases such as "past tense", "cancel your life subscription", "co-sign your obituary", "take off the census", "soul filing for divorce", "put on a T-shirt", "404 on your birth certificate", and "turn into a chalk outline" as substitutions for the word "death". He also uses "reverse baptism" as a euphemism specifically for drowning and variations of "unethically late-term abortion" for the killing of recently-born baby animals. In cases where a mother will kill her own babies, he will call that "Casey Anthony-ing" them. It should be noted he doesn't do this (just) for entertainment purposes; he originally posted his animal videos on TikTok (and still does), which bans the use of words such as "death" as part of its Terms of Service (and YouTube having similar views).
  • Death World: If he talks about a dangerous or poisonous animal that lives in Australia, he gives off a tone that speaks "of course it's over there".
  • Determinator: It's no secret what Mamadou thinks of the honey badger, considering his video on the subject of them is quite literally titled "Why Honey Badgers Don't Fear God or Lions", and he even put them straight up at the top of his "Top 10 Animals with Black Air Force Energy" list, above the likes of cape buffalo and even hippos.
    • Mixing this trope with Suicidal Overconfidence (or as Mamadou puts it, "crackhead courage"), honey badgers frequently steal the kills of leopards, will square off with both lions, both individually and as a pride, and highly venomous cobras, and even break into the hives of African bees (which are noted to be tenfold more aggressive than European bees) to gorge themselves on honey, often to the point of being stung to death.
    • The "champion" of their species, in his eyes, is a captive honey badger named Stoffel, who frequently used his cunning and intellect to break out of his holding pen and cause chaos for his handlers. Mamadou declares his crowning achievement in disrespect was the time when he escaped to go and pick a fight with the lion pen, getting mauled nearly to death, and then, once he was fully healed, escaping and returning to do it again. Mamadou notes that because he imprinted on humans as an infant, Stoffel never intended to actually escape, merely just for his own entertainment no matter how high he drove everyone's blood pressure. Things only got harder for them, by their own hand no less, when they later decided to find a female badger for him hoping she would keep Stoffel more docile, which, in Mamadou's words, was the worst thing in giving him the "Bonnie" to his "Clyde".
      Mamadou: If blatant disrespect were a sport… they still wouldn't play because anything with rules goes against a honey badger's belief system.
  • Devious Dolphins: Dolphins and orcas are not safe from his ridicule. In particular, orcas are often referenced as bullying everything under the sea due to their size, intelligence, and pack hunting tactics. There's a couple videos dedicated to their menacery, such as "Why The World Should Fear Dolphins not Sharks" and "The Truly Disturbing Reality of Dolphins". However, the latter video zig-zags this, with Mamadou discussing how despite all his jokes, dolphins are ultimately just animals without human morality, and are just as capable of altruism as they are capable of violence.
  • Didn't Think This Through: Mamadou cites a major case of this as the reason the "Dolphinarium" experiment — an attempt to teach dolphins to speak English led by neurologist John. C. Lilly and involving Margaret Howe Lovatt — was doomed from the start. Apparently, nobody involved in the multi-million project had stopped to think whether it was actually physically possible for a dolphin to speak English. Nor that mimicry is not comprehension, and that a dolphin echoing the sounds his handlers made didn't actually mean that he could understand the language.
  • Died Standing Up: Discussed; he mentions that a tiger's legs are so strong, they could die and still stay on their feet. A later video about facts he's gotten wrong acknowledges this as an unsubstantiated fact, noting that it's probably moreso just a tiger stability which contributed to this, as well as the possibility of this being a mere one-time incident that was reported as fact — bringing up a man who was found dead standing up in a kitchen while reaching into a cupboard as a similar example.
  • Don't Touch It, You Idiot!: In some occasions, Mamadou will explain a species of animal that Hates Being Touched after showing a person's bouts of stupidity, and will explain in great detail over how dangerous and poisonous they are.
  • Double Entendre: He makes at least one in most of his videos, but they really come to a zenith in "12 Minutes of Highly Questionable Bird Facts" when he talks about boobies, tits, and even the dickcissel, pronounced "dick sizzle".
  • Drugs Are Bad: When a commenter did not realize that Cocaine Bear was Very Loosely Based on a True Story, he goes into detail that, yes, it was inspired by an incident where a male black bear ate a 77-pound brick of cocaine, causing it to suffer from cerebral hemorrhaging and both renal and heart failure. When it finally expired, authorities did an autopsy and managed to find another 35 lbs left in its body.
  • Early-Installment Weirdness:
    • Some of Mamadou's videos from 2020 didn't have most of his creative Deadly Euphemisms or censorships. Some of his swearing goes uncensored until he starts doing so.
    • On the YouTube side, his early videos largely consisted of themed Compilation Re-releases of his TikTok videos.
  • Eats Babies: He brings up certain animals that will eat babies of other animals, including the animal's own parents.
  • Everyone Has Standards: Even he finds the scene in SpongeBob SquarePants where Squidward's holding a noose to be a little too morbid after discussing how the life cycle of a male octopus typically ends shortly after they pass on their genes to their offspring.
  • Evil Lawyer Joke: While discussing vampire finches (a species of Darwin finch) in "Cute Animals But They Slowly Get Worse For Your Health", he justifies their blood-drinking habits as "freshwater in the Galápagos is in less supply than lawyers in Heaven".
  • Face of a Thug:
    • How he describes harpy eagles. Despite their size, crushing talons and fierce appearance, they're remarkably docile outside of hunting and the only bird-of-prey that doesn't become aggressive towards humans that approach them. Unfortunately, this also makes them an easy target for poachers.
    • Similarly, the shoebill stork looks like a cross between a hippogryph and a Five Nights at Freddy's reject, decapitates crocodiles, and is one of the few animals a hippo will peacefully co-habitate with, but they tolerate humans near their nests and can be befriended by literally just bowing to them.
  • Failure Is the Only Option: In his video on how to survive different animal attacks, most of the segments start with him simply saying that you won't.
  • Faint in Shock: Opossums faint due to high levels of stress and it's not voluntary. They faint so badly, predators will think they're dead to the point of soiling themselves. And this lasts up to 4 hours.
  • The Farmer and the Viper: He details on one occasion the story of a man who took in a baby hippo that he rescued from a flood. Years later the same hippo ended up dragging him into the same river and mauling him to death.
  • Feathered Fiend:
  • Freudian Excuse: Mamadou shows an extremely deep hatred for pelicans and everything else in the Pelecaniform group of birds, but he admits he is severely biased against them due to a pelican attacking and nearly blinding him when he was a child.
  • Friend to All Living Things: The capybara, the largest rodent on Earth and one of the most chill animals to ever exist, willing to let all manner of birds and smaller mammals sit on or around it. Even some things that should be its natural predators will more often than not peacefully sit down next to it, with jaguars apparently being the one exception. Oh, and they have no fear of humans, to the point they literally roll over for belly rubs while being petted and are so easily domesticated they're commercially available as pets.
  • Gentle Giant:
    • He describes certain animals as such, like elephants that will protect a sleeping person with its trunk or try to save people that they think are drowning.
    • Whales are described as such, and he makes several key points as to why. While whales are gentle to humans, they are also this towards seals if an orca has an intent to hunt one, considering their creative ways of hunting seals. He also notes that, like dolphins have occasionally done, whales also tend to protect humans from sharks, noting one instance where a humpback kept itself between a diver and a tiger shark.
    • He has a colorful description about basking sharks.
      Mamadou: They're a highly dangerous menace to society… if you're zooplankton.
    • Turns out that even rhinos can fit this trope, albeit under the right conditions. As he points out, the ones living in the wilds of Africa are aggressive as a defense mechanism due to their poor eyesight and the abundance of predators. The ones living in the safety of zoos and such are surprisingly playful and affectionate towards their keepers, or as Mamadou puts it, they have the personality of an "armor-plated lapdog".
    • Gorillas in captivity are surprisingly gentle if they see a fallen child. Jambo and Benti for example were protective of a child that accidentally fell into their enclosure. Mamadou even indicates Harambe himself would have helped the child that fell into his enclosure without incident if people didn't start screaming and throwing objects in an already stressful environment.
    • Highland cattle also fit the description. Despite their ancient environments providing just as much reason for them to be as aggressive as cape buffalo, highland cattle are notoriously relaxed and generally quite safe to be around. Mamadou points out that the only threat they pose is accidentally knocking someone aside with their horns when turning their heads, which is arguably more the responsibility of whoever would stand that close to begin with.
  • Good Parents: Has a few on this discussion on both positive and negative aspects:
    • He comments how alligators will help their children hatch as well as male gharls carrying his children on his back.
    • Male tigers are known to be good fathers to the point they they will let their family eat first, then he eats last, in contrast to male lions. There is also a case of a male tiger raising his cubs after the mother died, rather than just leaving them to perish and making new cubs with another female. This is despite it not being seen as typical male tiger behavior. There's even a case of a male adopting orphan cubs that weren't even his.
    • Despite making fun of orcas, he does acknowledges that female orcas are good mothers, that even their grandmothers are good parents to her grandchildren.
    • Female pythons will go weeks without eating to warm her eggs.
    • Mother octopuses are famous for their life cycle necessitating that they sacrifice their lives for their children, by way of constantly staying by their eggs' side to clean them and guard against predators. It's to the point where female octopuses would rather devour their own tentacles for sustenance than willingly leave their offspring for a second to hunt, and eventually dying around the time their eggs finally hatch.
    • On the negative sides, some species of birds do have favorites and are only a good parent to the strongest of their offspring, while leaving the others to starve.
    • As much as he makes fun of koalas for their lack of intelligence and diet of poisonous, non-nutritious leaves, Mamadou does give them credit for being good mothers. They'll devotedly nurture their young for extended periods of time and are willing to fight to the death to protect them, unlike other Australian marsupials like the kangaroo and the quokka which will deliberately use their own babies as a decoy to escape predators.
  • Gosh Dang It to Heck!: He tries to avoid using hard swears due to YouTube and TikTok guidelines and uses censorship accordingly. Sometimes, it's Censored for Comedy.
  • Hidden Heart of Gold: Despite their reputation as solitary hunters, tigers are capable of both loyalty and selflessness. He brings up instances of male tigers sharing their kills with females they mated with and their cubs and even waiting for them to finish before eating. He also brings up a case of a male tiger mauling a poacher for killing his mate. They even treat their favorite zookeepers with affection and behave almost like giant housecats towards them. He puts this in contrast with lions, who tend to be more cutthroat and self-centered in their interactions despite being social predators.
  • Hive Mind: Siphonophores are tiny organisms that work this way. This includes the Portuguese Man-O-War.
  • Honorable Elephant: Elephants are Mamadou's favorite animal, and he will frequently heap praise and admiration for them.
  • Humans Are Bastards: You can't blame him for thinking this. Whenever an animal is curious and friendly towards humans, they show their "appreciation" for hunting them down. And more often than not, some people think it's a "great idea" to harass said animal when they've done nothing to them.
    Mamadou: God gave us thumbs and everyone else has to pay for it.
  • Incorrect Animal Noise: He brings up that a lion's roar in media actually belongs to tigers. The same goes with dolphins and their vocal effects actually belonging to sped-up kookabura calls.
  • Interspecies Adoption: A capybara by the name of Cheesecake was adopted by humans that hung out with dogs, thinking she is one herself. Then when she became an adult, she raised several puppies as her own children. This lasted until her caretakers gave her another capybara as a companion named Cobbler.
  • Interspecies Friendship:
    • Wolves and ravens get along with each other to the point that wolves will hunt prey and share with ravens. Ravens will also play with the wolves pups, and if a coyote is within proximity, they will go out of their way to snitch on them, having a pack of wolves gang up on a coyote.
    • Coyotes, meanwhile, will team up with badgers to hunt voles and other hole-dwelling rodents, and while the badger's digging ability and the coyote's speed and sense of smell are a devastating combination, they can also be seen just chilling.
    • Downplayed with octopuses and groupers. While they will occasionally hunt together, the relationship is far more transactional, and the octopus will not hesitate to smack the grouper around if it thinks the fish is withholding food.
  • Intimidating Revenue Service: In "Ridiculous Survival Tips that you may need (Parts 1-5)", Mamadou says that sharks are like the IRS — "when they come expecting something, you're going to lose a lot."
  • It Can Think: Animal intelligence and how humans constantly underestimate it is frequently brought up.
  • I Warned You: He states that if someone tries to antagonize an orangutan, there are going to be problems. Lo and behold, a 17-year-old tried to gain Internet fame by taunting one, and the orangutan retaliated in response. Moral of the story: Listen to what Mamadou says, and you might live longer.
  • Laser-Guided Karma: In Lamar Valley, a disease struck the Druid wolf back from 36 to 4, and they frequently fought with the rival wolves called the Sloughts. They also killed a coyote while his mate watched and ran. Eventually, the same disease that took most of the Druid wolves infected the Sloughts, which caused them to return to their original territory. A lone wolf nicknamed Casanova that spent time with the Druids replenished their numbers with their surviving daughters, allowing the Druids to take back their land.
  • Never Say "Die": He would, but due to TikTok guidelines, he has to use Deadly Euphemisms in its place, though the way he uses the euphemisms are really creative. This is subverted and lampshaded humorously in "The Unspeakable Horrors of the Deep Sea", made in collaboration with Lindsay Nikole; when she remembers that the video is a YouTube collaboration, she backtracks herself just to say "die" instead.
    Lindsay: That sounds like one of the worst ways to be unalived in the ocean. Oh wait, this isn't a TikTok collaboration. That sounds like one of the worst ways to die in the ocean.
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!: In Yellowstone back in 1995, wolves started going after livestock to the point that farmers and the US Army got involved by hunting them down, because they were considered "undesired predators". Unfortunately, the elk population exploded to the point that they ate off everything in the area, to the point that bears, magpies, and ravens had to find another source of meat somewhere else. They also destroyed the willow in which beavers needed to survive. It got so bad that wolves in other parts of the US were migrated in the area to reduce the elk population, and only one colony of beavers were left.
  • The Nicknamer: He gives a rather interesting nicknames for certain animals, such as "homicidal Oreos" for orcas (or anything for them for that matter) and "homicidal bar codes" for zebras.
  • Non-Indicative Name: The flying lemur. It's a rodent of its own class, and it glides. It's also not related to lemurs.
  • Not Evil, Just Misunderstood: The topic of "Top 10 Most Criminally Misunderstood Animals". He made a whole video detailing several animals on a list that gained a bad reputation over the years — vultures, piranhas, stingrays, dolphins, pigs, rats, spiders, hyenas, and sharks. The one exception on the list are squirrels, which he describes to have a good reputation but are nasty little buggers in reality.
  • Nothing Is Scarier: Mamadou more often than not describes the ocean this way, since there are more unknown creatures that live in the deep sea, and the ones that do get discovered, he describes them in a less flattering way.
    Mamadou: Billions. We've spent billions of dollars trying to explore space when the real ET shit's is happening in the ocean.
  • "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer: When he says an animal's name or group name, he clarifies that he isn't making it up.
  • O.O.C. Is Serious Business: "When Animals Become Serial Killers" averts Mamadou's policy of Never Say "Die" and using Deadly Euphemisms as he relays stories of animals with outright murderous tendencies. Nearly all mentions of deaths, including one person being Driven to Suicide, are explicit.
  • [Popular Saying], But...: At the end of "Nature Not Being Sober for 10 minutes straight (Mndiaye_97 TikTok Compilations)":
    Mamadou: True beauty lies within, unless you're an elephant, because they've got a cyclops in there.
  • The Power of Lust: In "The Insane Plot Armor of Cats", one of the examples provided of cats travelling very long distances in comparatively short timeframes is of a tiger reported to have travelled over 800 miles across northern India over a period of five months in search of a mate. The tiger is described in the video as having been fuelled by "the power of horny".
  • Prepare to Die: Mamadou emphasizes that when it comes to certain animalsnote , if they decide they want to turn you into past tense, there's little you can do save for accept the inevitable, make peace with your deity of choice, and forgive others so your grudges don't weigh you down as you begin to ascend to Heaven.
  • Pyromaniac: You wouldn't think a bird would do this as a hunting strategy. The black kite is a hawk in Australia that will go out of its way to literally burn everything to the ground in order to hunt its prey, to the point that they will steal cooking fires and burn the grass a mile away, which got so bad that farmers would actually hunt them to stop them from causing fires that would reach their homes. However, they are protected by law, which means they can't be stopped setting things on fire to hunt prey.
  • Rapid-Fire Comedy: The unrelenting pace of Mamadou's voiceover means there's often barely time to process one of his Unusual Euphemisms before he drops another one and just keeps going.
  • Reality Is Unrealistic: One of the most common ways he discusses Artistic License – Biology. While there are some animals depicted in media as savage monsters and some such as lions as noble creatures, he points out this tends to be the case, such as great white sharks being hunted due to paranoia surrounding then because of Jaws even though they're docile and don't hunt humans.
  • Running Gag: Whenever he mentions bush babies for any reason, he takes a moment to put one on screen.
    Mamadou: That's a bush baby.
  • Sex Is Violence: For ferrets, they actually engage in violent sexual activity. When a female ferret mates with a male, the male becomes very abusive. And it turns out that female ferrets do need violence during sex, since once they start producing estrogen, they need to lay off steam because if they didn't, they will actually die, since their bone marrow won't produce red blood cells.
  • Shown Their Work: The reason Mamadou is popular with biologists and causal animal video viewers is how accurate his videos on the topic of the animal subject is. Several biologists and marine biologists are impressed over how well he did his research, and will give more additional pointers on the subject.
  • Silly Simian: Gibbons are "the funniest animal" according to one video. Reasons being due to their incredibly long arms compared to their small body, coupled with their impulsive "don't think it, just do" actions, and their "great apes' little brother" personality.
  • Sole Survivor: A pregnant female coyote in Lamar Valley, Yellowstone saw her mate get mauled to death by a wolf pack called the Sleuths. Both her and her mate got along with the Druid pack that was 36 strong until the Sleuths came and pick a fight with them. Then a disease started dwindling the Druids' numbers, and the Sleuths took over the valley.
  • Stealth Insult: Any animal with a deformed-looking natural look is referred to as a "rough draft".
  • Stealthy Colossus: While recounting his trip to an elephant sanctuary, Mamadou says that elephants are very noisy… except when they don't want to be, which he found a little unnerving. He could look away from elephant, blink twice, look back and it'd be gone.
  • Stuff Blowing Up: He warns people not to get near a dead whale. Dead whales expand due to a buildup of gasses trapped inside its body. They will unexpectedly explode just like the Taiwan incident when scientists were bringing a dead sperm whale to their lab only for it to unexpectedly explode in the middle of town. This ended up showering pedestrians in blood and guts, but no one surprisingly got hurt for the most part, since exploding whales has a force of a lit dynamite.
  • Tag Team: When taking a deep dive into crocodiles and related crocodillians, he described how one account of large-scale teamwork between a large group of crocs entails one group hunting fish by driving them to the shallows, and one group on standby. Whenever one croc got a kill, they'd swap for a croc that was waiting on the shores.
  • Take That!: He often throws jabs at people who had no idea what they're getting themselves into, especially when they see a highly poisonous animal or are trying to remove a keystone predator in a specific area where they are needed to do population control.
  • Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Coyotes and badgers hate each other's guts, but they will put their hatred aside to hunt prairie dogs.
  • Threatening Shark:
    • Subverted. He actually explains some sharks are docile, and even friendly with humans (some can actually be jealous if their favorite humans interacts with another shark), and evens mentions how a man met with a baby Port Jackson shark and how they bonded, to the point that he introduced his children to said shark.
      Mamadou: Sharks are really just the pitbulls of the ocean.
    • Double-subverted when a shark attacks a boat, because in their point of view, sharks thinks a boat is a whale calf, and once they realize the boat they just attacked isn't a whale, they'll leave the person they just harassed alone.
  • Too Dumb to Live:
    • Human stupidity is frequently the subject of ridicule.
      • Found a blue jellyfish-looking thing on the beach? It's a venomous siphonophore called a Man-o-War. See a blue-ring octopus? Its venomous bite is strong enough to send you to the hospital and light enough you probably won't even feel it.
        Mamadou: (sees a man pick up a dead Man-o-War and then pretend to lick its air bell; delivers a bleeped-out Precision F-Strike) This is why women live longer than men: shit like this.
      • He also mentions how people are dangerously careless at zoos, especially if it's feeding time, and specifically talks about how an idiot that tried to break into a zoo and landed in a pen of tigers, or a man who tried to gain Internet fame by provoking an orangutan, piss him off so much.
        Mamadou: (speaking about things that anger zookeepers) No other animal causes more migraines and high blood pressure than a hairless primate armed with an iPhone and a sense of entitlement.
    • On the flip side, every time Casual Geographic talks about koalas, he'll always mention how they fit into this trope.
    • The intro of his video on the traumatizing reality of ants shows an ant jumping onto a spider.
    • Pandas, especially those in captivity, also get this treatment. As it turns out, male pandas are so dense that they often can't tell that a female wants to mate with them, and certain breeding programs becoming desperate enough to show videos of pandas mating to their pandas and utilizing viagra.
  • To Serve Man: There's a reason Churchill, Manitoba, Canada forbids citizens from locking their cars. Polar bears actively hunt humans, and your best course of action if you ever see one is to either hide in your own vehicle or a stranger's.
  • Trust Password: Felines will slow-blink if a human they see is trustworthy. This extends to larger cats like leopards and tigers, since it lets the human they're in contact with know that they trust them. And it works both ways too.
  • Unusual Euphemism: Just about any topic that might get platform guidelines in a tizzy (and some that won't, for the aesthetic), Mamadou will discuss obliquely through creative witticisms rather than plain language. For sake of example, he says the first few men out of an army of a hundred to fight a gorilla would definitely "get to see Tupac Live".
  • Vindicated by History: In-Universe. Mamadou notices how Threatening Shark, Killer Gorilla, and Savage Wolves are being discredited, since people began studying wolves, gorillas, and sharks, and they are not as much of a threat as one would think. Ditto to wolves as it's revealed that wolves are actually shy around humans, and the ones in captivity are as playful as pet dogs.
  • Walking Wasteland: He explains why prey animals are this and keystone species are an important part of an ecosystem. For one, overabundance of prey animals will cause a wasteland, since a top predator is needed to control overpopulation. The reason is because prey animals will start to eat everything around them until they die. He even showed a comparison image where since there weren't enough sea otters to control the sea urchin population, it became an urchin barren.
  • Warm-Hearted Whales: Not killer whales, because they are more akin to Devious Dolphins. Humpback whales, on the other hand, can and will drive off orcas to not only protect themselves and their pod, but also other animals that orcas typically pray on like seals. They've also been known to save humans from sharks. Beluga whales also count, as while they may look like cousins to dolphins, they are not only very smart, but very friendly towards humans, being known to play pranks on them, retrieve items for them that are dropped into water around them, even become friends with humans.
  • Well, This Is Not That Trope: Many of the segments in "How to Survive Any Animal Attack (Mndiaye_97 Compilations) Original start with some variation on this.
    "How to Survive a Moose Attack — oh, wait, wrong title. How to Make Peace with Your God, Because That's the Best You Can Do if This Tank with Antlers Wants to Take Your Life."
    "How to Survive a Polar Bear: first, you want to make yourself look bi– are you serious? Did you really think I was gonna have actual advice here?"
    "How to Survive a Chimpanzee Attack: (takes a long pause, reads a bit of a book, and sips a cup of coffee) …Oh, I'm sorry. You're not going to."
    "How to Survive a Hippo Attack: You're not going to. (beat) That's the end of the video."
    "How to Survive a Hyena Attack: After extensive research, I came to the conclusion that if you put yourself in a position where this guy decides your fate, you don't deserve to be alive to waste our oxygen supply."
    "How to Survive an Elephant: Notice I said 'elephant' and not 'elephant attack'. That's because if an elephant decides it wants to hurt you, there isn't a force in nature that's gonna save you."
  • You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: His reaction to a certain species of ant, Protomagnathus americanus, and their behavior hits really close. Trust him on this one.
  • You Keep Using That Word: He basically points out how the concept of "alpha wolves" technically don't exist, since wolves are social predators that, no pun intended, are Papa Wolf to their family. An alpha wolf implies a wolf that's low in the wolf pack manages to fight his way up to the social ladder and fight the biggest wolf of them all (his father), but the males would rather hunt with their family as a pack, but not gain control. Putting unrelated wolves in one location however makes them hostile to each other. The only known species of animals that does have such social structure are hyenas, and it's lead by a dominant female (sometimes non-violently).
  • Zerg Rush: The Humboldt, also known as "the red devil", is one of the rare squid species that will hunt in groups and do this. How many, you ask? 1000 of them. Just ask Lindsay.
    Lindsay: That sounds like one of the worst ways to be unalived in the ocean. Oh, wait, this isn't a TikTok collaboration. That sounds like one of the worst ways to die in the ocean.

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