Grahame, a terrific article which hits the nuances necessary to discuss politically charged management options without becoming a polemic. Cheers

I respect any indigenous animals right to live in their environment - especially crocodiles, one should not play favourites but there is a lot to respect about crocs - from their territorial natures (a natural due accorded to an apex predator) through to the care for their young - not all reptiles put such an investment in the early stages of juveniles as a female crocodile.

I can state all this from the safety of my home in Southern Australia, which, due to climate is a crocodile free zone. I am grateful for that. Crocodiles scare me more than any other predator.

Perhaps a part of the solution lies within the closing paragraphs of Grahame's article:

"It is crocodiles that are controlling the size of the wild crocodile population, and if the larger ones are selectively removed, the population could be expected to expand.

In any overview, selective culling has a role to play in the overall management of crocodiles, but is not the public safety panacea that it may superficially appear to be."

Which suggests that culling the more common and younger crocs would be part of a strategy in controlling numbers. However, the primary cause of human interaction with these reptiles is the ever encroaching developments as humans spread across previously untouched crocodile dominated environments.

If we expect top predators to leave us in peace - remaining in our own already established environments and stabilising our own populations would also be effective.

Yes a good article, and culling is something similar to the shark net arguments. A crocodile cull won't make the NT waterways safe, any more than shark nets make the Southern beaches safe for swimmers.

However I find that comments about the commercial crocodile farming as being sustainable a bit hard to swallow. My understanding is that the Industry is (or has been) financed by the NT government and tourism visitation to the farms. Crocodile skin products are also outrageously expensive, with limited local or overseas markets.

But still, an otherwise good article, and I hope it draws lots of comments.

Having over the past forty years had a bit to do with crocs, including an extremely frightening attack in the lagoon of Manus Island by a very large creature on our Zodiac, they have a certain interest to me. Having just returned from the Burketown area of Far Western Queensland, and visiting a station owned by a family member, crocs remain a problem there. Not from taking stock, but, the sheer threat. The last floods left a substantial number inland, who as the waters retreated they moved back to the water. It reported that animals were seen some 300 K from the shores of the Gulf, and that they do do a significant part in destroying the feral pig population. It is reported that that appalling part of Australia's noxious species - the Cane Toad does kill off a large number of young animals, and this shown to us last week with a couple of dead ones pulled out of a marsh area, and after having their guts opened up toads seen inside? Our uncle (long deceased) purchased the station partially on his earnings as a croc shooter in the 1940-early 50's after he got out of the Royal Air Force (came to Australia with the RAF Spitfire squadrons in Darwin), and earned some serious money (at least 4,500 pounds saved, added to some alluvial gold taken over the same period). His tales of shooting revolved around the taking of small young animals whose pelt was soft and viable for sale, an important part of the shooting was the killing of very large animals (20 foot plus not unusual) whose main source of food being young crocs! So by shooting these it allowed the growth of young animals to be taken as a "crop", so he and his partner would routinely shoot anything over 12 foot. The skin having little value, and the flesh was used to feed the smaller stock (he used to go into hysterics when told of trendy eating houses in Sydney serving crocodile meat up-eating it for a few days would put you off for life!) So in his way he and he and his partner were doing a crude developement of the resourse. Ancedotal evidence told over the past week, tells us that the croc population in the Gulf of Carpentaria is very large, and equally so the size of animals is, with reliable sizings of live animals being twenty footers (one such size was taken in the Southern Phillipines earlier this year for use as a tourist attraction.) And there is strong evidence that there are larger animals, with one reported in the size range of 26 foot in the West at Limmet Blight and the East at the mouth of the Staaten River, with the way that they travel in the sea quite probably the same animal. There are reports in the area of animals acting like Indian Mugger crocodiles, with the water drying up, they travelling at night to (water) pastures new, with my cousin trailing one and it covering some 12 kilometres till it got to a new billabong!!!! The ships surgeons log of HMS Beagle reported taking a Saltwater Crocodile in the Arafura off South West New Guinea, they unable to take it onboard and ripped away by some creatures, they estimated it to have been 37 foot long. The Colonial Museum in Rotterdam prior to its 1940 detruction by German bombers, had the skull of a animal that had a estimated body of 31 feet!
My personal thoughts have always been that the culling of the really large animals would enhance the younger population in the wild.Yours, Mackinlay
PS. As an aside, our uncles stories to the British author Neville Shute who came to Australia permanently in 1950, to him in 1948 became part of the story line of the second part of his classic "A Town Like Alice" where the havesting of croc skins formed the basis of making a town like Alice.

Hi! Dr.Webb, we are very much in accordance with you. From our place, at Cispata Bay, San Antero, Colombia, we are concerned because we could be face with similar situations. That is reason why we believe that one of the most important goal for the conservation program, at this point, is to be able to downlist the C. acutus population from Cispata and, particularly the local community involved in benefiting financially from the sustainable use. It has to be note that Cispata Bay could be consider, by now, like a ¨natural oasis¨ and the population can be very much in risk in case that a similar situations happen. In the same way, it will have a negative impact to reach the population recovery of other crocodile’s at Colombia that are very much diminish at extreme, without knowing their real situation.

While there is intensive Croc control around Darwin (and to a lesser degree around other large coastal towns) the main interface between crocs and humans is an indigenous one. In that great arc from Townsville to Exmouth it is mainly indigenous people who stare down crocs. In this sense the issue of croc/human predation is up to the indigenous community to take the lead on. This raises some interesting questions, as most indigenous people under 40 years of age have not had the same exposure to croc issues as the old people who lived with crocs before the hunting started. To what degree do these 'under 40' people have the skills and knowledge of their ancestors? It would have been difficult to pass down these skill sets to young people in a world where crocs were mainly absent. They were the years from 1972 (the end of hunting) till the late 1990s when crocs began to reinvade areas from which they were absent. It seems that despite we humans being the 'supreme being' we still have to learn about the spreading danger of anthropophagic reptiles by loosing a few of our number.