The Mugger and the Subcontinent

Across this book the saltwater crocodile is the giant, but on the Indian subcontinent the animal that most often kills is not the saltie. It is the mugger. The marsh crocodile, Crocodylus palustris, is smaller, plainer and less celebrated, and it has become the principal man-eater of a billion-person landmass for one simple reason: it lives exactly where people live.

A large mugger reaches three to three and a half metres, well short of the six-metre bulk a big saltwater crocodile can attain. On size alone it looks like the lesser danger. Look again. Danger is not size multiplied by nothing; it is size multiplied by contact, and no large crocodilian on Earth makes more daily contact with human beings than the mugger. It is a generalist that thrives in still and slow water of every kind: wild marshes and rivers, but also reservoirs, irrigation canals, farm ponds, temple tanks and the drainage of towns. Where the saltwater crocodile needs an estuary, the mugger will settle for a village pond, and so it ends up sharing water with people who have no choice but to use it.