The Perfect Ambush Predator

If you set out to design an ambush predator for the water's edge, you would be hard pressed to improve on the crocodile. Everything about it is arranged for a single purpose. One job. To remain unseen until the instant of the strike, and to make that strike unsurvivable. Tens of millions of years of refinement have produced an animal so well suited to its method that it has scarcely needed to change. To understand crocodile safety is, in large part, to understand just how completely the odds are stacked at the water's edge, and therefore how absolutely one must avoid ever entering that arena.

The umwelt: the water as the crocodile senses it

There is a German word to carry with you to the African water's edge, coined by the biologist Jakob von Uexküll. Umwelt. It means the world as an animal actually perceives it: the world its own senses build around it, which is a different thing from the world as it is. Tom Crutchfield, one of the expert authorities behind this series, puts it plainly: you cannot be safe around a Nile crocodile, let alone live alongside it, until you understand its umwelt, how it senses the water, rather than assuming it experiences the river the way you do.