The Perfect Ambush Predator

To be truly croc wise — and to genuinely respect this animal — you have to understand what it actually is. Not the cartoon, not the trophy, but the machine: eighty million years of refinement into possibly the most efficient ambush predator that has ever lived. When you understand a big crocodilian’s anatomy, two things happen at once. You stop underestimating it, and you start to feel something close to awe. Both are what keep you alive — and what make you want to protect it. This chapter is the one to read slowly. Everything else in the book makes more sense once you know what you are dealing with.

Size, length and strength

The two animals an American is most likely to end up close to — often far closer than they realize, because these animals share the water’s edge with people every day — are the American alligator and the American crocodile, and neither is small. A big bull alligator usually tops out around eleven or twelve feet, which is already an enormous animal; exceptionally large individuals reach thirteen, and the largest ever reliably measured was just under sixteen feet — but that is extraordinarily rare. A mature female most often maxes out near eight feet, and though a few grow larger, even that is longer and heavier than the biggest human being alive. The American crocodile runs in the same league: it commonly reaches twelve to fourteen feet, with large old animals matching or beating a big gator. Either species can weigh anywhere from several hundred pounds to half a ton and beyond — muscle, bone and armor built around a single purpose, with a tail powerful enough to drive the whole body clear of the water and break a grown person’s leg with a single sweep. There is no human strength, in the water or out of it, that competes with an animal like that. (The largest crocodilian on earth, the saltwater crocodile of Asia and Australia, is larger still — over twenty feet and more than a ton — but you do not need a record-breaker to be killed. An ordinary gator will do it.)