Where to live?

Where to live?

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Croc can't go on | Tears for the crocodile | Pyrrhic victory | Where to live? | Lost manhood | Where to croc?

Once released in the wild, many crocodiles are swept away by floods. Many stray into unprotected areas and get trapped in fishing nets protected area has been pending before the Madhya Pradesh High Court’s Gwalior bench.

Sand mining is not the only threat to the gharial. The creature has a hard time surviving in their strictly riverine habitats when heavy rains floods rivers. Many are flushed down into shallow, inhospitable stretches outside pas. "The linear, riverine habitat of the gharial is particularly disadvantageous for the newly hatched gharials," says B C Choudhary, a zoologist with the Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun.

Take, for example, the situation in the Satkosia Gorge Sanctuary in Orissa. Seven hundred 'head-started' gharial (young animals reared till the length of 120 cm) were released into the sanctuary since 1978. At present, there are only two of them left.

Experts say that this happened even when use of fishing nets have been effectively stopped, bamboo rafting (which disturbed basking and nesting females) discontinued, and the sanctuary, on the whole, well managed. They ascribe the project's failure to fluctuations in the water level of the Mahanadi. Every year during the monsoon, reservoirs on the Hirakud dam swell and water is released downstream before it reaches the danger level, deluding the gharials.

"Though not studied extensively, fluctuations in water level tend to induce migration in fish, an important prey for gharials," says D Basu, a key gharial researcher with Uttar Pradesh's forest department.

A barrage

Shrinking space Katerniaghat habitat circumscribed by barrage

In kws, Bahraich district, Uttar Pradesh, the gharial has come up against a barrage. Quite literally. A barrage downstream at the confluence of Girwa and Mohana river has drastically reduced the 400 sq km sanctuary's capacity to accommodate gharials, by regulating water flows in an unfavourable way. Only a 4-km stretch of the Girwa is available as an ideal habitat for gharials.

R K Pandey, divisional forest officer at Bahraich, says there are only five male adults at the sanctuary -- a marginal improvement compared to 1970 when only two gharials and three eggs were found in the Girwa. He also says that the reptiles face threats from fishing downstream. "Gharials are strangled to death when they are accidentally snapped up in fishing nets." Harry V Andrews, crocodile expert and director of Madras Crocodile Bank Trust, says that there are 47 gharials (35 adult females, four males, three sub-adults and five juveniles) along a 5-km stretch of the Girwa. The smaller numbers of male gharials is worries many like him.

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