When Webb arrived in the Top End, it was difficult to find a saltwater crocodile. After the Second World War, overzealous hunters had blasted them for skins and didn’t stop even after the supply had collapsed and they were teetering on the edge of extinction. By the time salties were protected in 1971, just three to five percent of the original population remained.
Once salties began recovering, scientists and policymakers were faced with the next big obstacle: convincing people to keep them around. Persuading people to coexist with deadly predators over the long term, Webb asserts, is one of the world’s greatest conservation challenges. It’s easy to get people to rally around a predator when it has nearly vanished and become a romantic notion, but people are fickle: “If protection works in terms of increasing numbers, crocodiles eat more people, and then people want to get rid of them again,” he says. That’s what happened in 1979 and ’80, when crocodiles killed two people and badly injured two others. During the same time, an old crocodile named Sweetheart began flipping tourist fishing boats. The 5.1-meter, 780-kilogram brute—as long as a medium-sized dinosaur—would wrestle with the boat as the panicked passengers swam to shore. Sweetheart had likely mistaken the sound of the motor for the growl of another crocodile, Webb says, but these incidents threatened to unravel the conservation efforts and topple the NT’s nascent tourism industry. For people to willingly tolerate crocodiles, Webb reasons, they need to benefit from the situation—it’s not realistic to expect a community to conserve an animal out of appreciation for its intrinsic value alone.
Inspired by similar programs in Zimbabwe and Louisiana, Webb and his colleagues crafted the NT’s first formal incentive-driven management program in the early 1980s on behalf of the territorial government. It spawned what is now a multifaceted and far-reaching industry that works like this: people drop from helicopters and beat through the swamps to gather wild eggs—roughly 52,000 a year—which they sell to local crocodile farms. (In the wild, egg mortality, often caused by flooding, runs at 75 to 80 percent, and hatchling survival is density dependent, so collecting has no apparent impact on the wild population.) In turn, landowners receive a royalty from egg collection on their property—most harvesting takes place in remote aboriginal communities—which helps compensate them for livestock they lose to crocodiles and motivates them to retain habitat. Farms raise the hatchlings and sell their skins; rangers are employed to manage crocodiles in public areas; and independent permit holders make a living collecting animals from the wild, either for a farm’s breeding program or for trade. It all amounts to an AU $25-million industry.
Salties also play a significant role in the NT’s $1.61-billion tourism industry—the biggest employer in the region. Visitors pose for cheesy photos with hatchlings, dip into a croc’s tank within a “cage of death,” watch feedings, take croc-spotting excursions, and shop boutiques and souvenir shops for coveted wallets and belts or kitschy beer cozies and hatbands.
- More Here
Once salties began recovering, scientists and policymakers were faced with the next big obstacle: convincing people to keep them around. Persuading people to coexist with deadly predators over the long term, Webb asserts, is one of the world’s greatest conservation challenges. It’s easy to get people to rally around a predator when it has nearly vanished and become a romantic notion, but people are fickle: “If protection works in terms of increasing numbers, crocodiles eat more people, and then people want to get rid of them again,” he says. That’s what happened in 1979 and ’80, when crocodiles killed two people and badly injured two others. During the same time, an old crocodile named Sweetheart began flipping tourist fishing boats. The 5.1-meter, 780-kilogram brute—as long as a medium-sized dinosaur—would wrestle with the boat as the panicked passengers swam to shore. Sweetheart had likely mistaken the sound of the motor for the growl of another crocodile, Webb says, but these incidents threatened to unravel the conservation efforts and topple the NT’s nascent tourism industry. For people to willingly tolerate crocodiles, Webb reasons, they need to benefit from the situation—it’s not realistic to expect a community to conserve an animal out of appreciation for its intrinsic value alone.
Inspired by similar programs in Zimbabwe and Louisiana, Webb and his colleagues crafted the NT’s first formal incentive-driven management program in the early 1980s on behalf of the territorial government. It spawned what is now a multifaceted and far-reaching industry that works like this: people drop from helicopters and beat through the swamps to gather wild eggs—roughly 52,000 a year—which they sell to local crocodile farms. (In the wild, egg mortality, often caused by flooding, runs at 75 to 80 percent, and hatchling survival is density dependent, so collecting has no apparent impact on the wild population.) In turn, landowners receive a royalty from egg collection on their property—most harvesting takes place in remote aboriginal communities—which helps compensate them for livestock they lose to crocodiles and motivates them to retain habitat. Farms raise the hatchlings and sell their skins; rangers are employed to manage crocodiles in public areas; and independent permit holders make a living collecting animals from the wild, either for a farm’s breeding program or for trade. It all amounts to an AU $25-million industry.
Salties also play a significant role in the NT’s $1.61-billion tourism industry—the biggest employer in the region. Visitors pose for cheesy photos with hatchlings, dip into a croc’s tank within a “cage of death,” watch feedings, take croc-spotting excursions, and shop boutiques and souvenir shops for coveted wallets and belts or kitschy beer cozies and hatbands.
- More Here
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