LEARNING TO LIVE WITH A CARNIVORE

Not so long ago saltwater crocodiles were considered vermin in Australia and shot on sight. Now the reptiles are appreciated as a valuable commodity in the country's far north...and they're thriving.

- KAREN MCGHEE 

HOW DO YOU persuade a community to support the protection of a killer predator that silently waits in murky recreational waterways to occasionally ambush and tear apart people?

That was the dilemma facing ecologists in the Northern Territory in the late 1970s and early 80s. After almost a decade of legal protection, the number of saltwater crocodiles around the 2m bracket was rising across northern Australia as were attacks on people. Suddenly, after years of barely a sighting of the reptiles near Darwin, people were being killed or hideously injured in the jaws of crocs near the northern capital, and a 5.1m male, known ironically as Sweetheart, hit the headlines for terrorising tourists at a popular fishing hole, knocking them out of boats.

Politicians, community leaders and tourism operators screamed for a return to mass culling to make the newly self-governing NT safe from the huge carnivores, while the now-legendary croc researcher Professor Grahame Webb and other experts looked for creative ways to ensure the species continued to be protected. The croc population was going up, the animals were getting bigger, and we were facing this impending collision course between humans and reptiles,” he recalls. People were saying, Those things eat cows, horses and people! Why do you want to protect them?”

‘Salties’ might be as Aussie as koalas, but it was clear to Grahame that Territorians would need a strong incentive to develop empathy for the big reptiles. And so he and his colleagues swung their weight behind crocodile farming and tourism to transition croc protection into an economically valuable proposition. It was the beginning of what’s now known as incentive-driven conservation’, which has helped transform wild crocodiles into a commodity, underpinning goods and services worth well over 100 million dollars to the Territory’s economy.