The Numbers, and Where They Come From

An earlier chapter told the human story behind the record. This one is the reference: the figures in brief, and the sources they come from, so you can weigh them for yourself. Two things first. Attacks in remote Africa are badly underreported, so every total here is a floor, not a ceiling. And the honest figures come as ranges and orders of magnitude, never as a tidy count, because no one has a full count to give.

The scale of it

On the available evidence, the Nile crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus) kills more human beings than any other crocodilian on Earth, and it stands among the large animals responsible for the most human deaths on the African continent. Working from field study and the attack databases, researchers including Simon Pooley of Birkbeck, University of London have put the global toll of crocodilian attacks in the region of a thousand a year as a working estimate, the majority of them in Africa, and the majority of those from the Nile crocodile. Estimates of Nile crocodile deaths alone across sub-Saharan Africa plausibly run into the hundreds each year, and likely higher once unrecorded cases are counted. Read every one of those numbers as a conservative minimum.