Browsing Posts tagged Crocodiles

Animals in the News

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by Gregory McNamee

Alas, poor Pancho, we hardly knew ye. Alligators are a dime a dozen down in the swamps of Florida. American crocodiles: well, that’s a different matter; they’re altogether rare, for which reason knowing herpetologists keep a close eye on them.

Crocodile---© Karen Givens/

Crocodile—© Karen Givens/

The reptile scientists were doubtless no more surprised than the two swimmers whom a 12-foot-long, 300-pound croc nicknamed Pancho bit when they wandered into his canal last month—his canal, we say, for Pancho certainly saw it that way, having been twice relocated from it and twice returned. Sad to say, but this time Pancho was relocated permanently, bound for the crocodilian afterlife on the far shore of the Nile. The Miami Herald reports that the unfortunate incident, which took place in Coral Gables, has prompted wildlife officials to rethink how they might handle such matters in the future—and given the encroachment of human Floridians on the worlds of crocs, sharks, manatees, and anacondas, there will surely be many more future matters to deal with.

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It should come as no surprise that when humans leave animals alone, things usually work out better for both human and animal alike. So it is with the lobsters, conches, and other marine creatures that dwell just off the coast of Belize, much of whose territorial waters are protected as marine reserves. Reports the Wildlife Conservation Society, the program now has enough longevity to afford useful data on what happens when overused resource zones are allowed to lie fallow: the species within them bounce back from the edge of oblivion. Remarks lead scientist Janet Gibson, “It’s clear that no-take zones can help replenish the country’s fisheries and biodiversity, along with the added benefits to tourism and even resilience to climate change.” continue reading…

by Gregory McNamee

If you want to look into the future, you need travel no farther than Florida, a frontier of many kinds.

Giant panda feeding in a bamboo forest, Sichuan province, China--Wolfshead—Ben Osborne/Ardea London

Giant panda feeding in a bamboo forest, Sichuan province, China–Wolfshead—Ben Osborne/Ardea London

It is not just that Florida represents an increasingly more multicultural America, though there is that, with the many languages and ethnicities evident—more, it is that Florida is an environmental battleground being fought between native and introduced species, the latter presenting cases studies of, on one hand, the vanity of human wishes and, on the other, the law of unintended consequences.

Consider this news item from the Washington Post, with its promising opener, “Only in Florida can a search for one invasive monster lead to the discovery of another.” The “monster” being sought was the giant Burmese python, countless numbers of which now inhabit the Everglades and are moving north. The monster encountered was a Nile crocodile, one of those giants that eat everything in sight—not just their alligator distant cousins, natives of the Sunshine State, but also humans. continue reading…

by Gregory McNamee


Well, hum a few bars of “The Dark-Eyed Sailor” while considering this news from the fossil world: back in the heady days of Emersonian Transcendentalism and Thoreauvian wandering, half of a fossilized turtle humerus, taken from a cutbank in New Jersey, winds up in the hands of Louis Agassiz, the great naturalist. The other remains buried in Cretaceous-era sediments for another century and a half until it’s plucked out by an amateur paleontologist, who, on examining the marks that a shark gnawed into it way back when, realizes it’s not a strangely shaped rock. The halves are reunited, and suddenly scientists have a sense of scale of one of the biggest species of sea turtle that ever lived—a “monster, probably the maximum size you can have for a sea turtle,” as one paleontologist told BBC News. Look for an account of the discovery and its implications in a forthcoming number of the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.
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Animals in the News

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by Gregory McNamee





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by Gregory McNamee


Nile crocodile swallowing a fish--© Johan Swanepoel/

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