The Global Toll

Before the last chapters, look squarely at the numbers. Not to frighten you, but to understand their shape and their limits. Statistics on crocodile attacks are gathered chiefly by the CrocAttack database, formerly CrocBITE, maintained through Charles Darwin University in Darwin. It is the standard global repository, and every figure in this book that carries a count comes, directly or indirectly, from that effort or from the researchers who work with it. All of them. It is also, by the honest admission of the people who run it, incomplete, and understanding why is as important as the numbers themselves.