Redefining the Crocodile
WANTED Home for endangered species. Weight up to a half ton. Ferocious appearance. Usually does not attack without provocation, but has been known to eat people.
Since its establishment in 1987, the government-run Crocodile Farming Institute has been working to change the image of the only survivor of the dinosaur age and preserve the two species of crocodile native to the Philippines. Both of them – the salt-water crocodile and the smaller, rarer Philippines crocodile – are in danger of extinction here.
The institute s mission is two-fold :
- To develop techniques for breeding and rearing crocodile in captivity so that farmers can be trained to market their hides (skins) used to make bags, shoes and other consumer product ; and meat as a rare delicacy.
-To find natural habitats for crocodile and return some of them to the wild.
The first part of the mission has met with success. The institute, on Palawan Island about 560 kilometers southwest of Manila, is now home to about 2540 crocodile, 80 percent of whom were born in captivity.
Breeding crocodiles is not simply a matter of putting a male and a female together and leaving nature to do the rest, Sammy Magbuana explained. Crocodiles are choosy about their mates. “We‘ve had cases of deaths where the two just did not get along well at all,” he said. Of those born in captivity here, about 520 are rare Philippine crocodiles, discovered on the island of Mindoro by American naturalist Carl Schmidt of the Museum of natural History in Chicago in 1935.
The most recent survey, undertaken by the Smithsonian Institute in 1982, estimated only 500 to 1,000 Philippine crocodile, or crocodylus mindorensis, survived in the wild. Officials are looking for remote areas on the inlands of Palawan and Mindanao to serve as crocodile preserves and then release the creatures into the wild. But Institute officials admit they are running into problems in convincing local residents that they can live safely alongside crocodile.
“We haven’t actually released any of them back yet in their natural habitat, although we plan to do that” Magbuana said. “Right now, we are studying lakes and rivers which can be declared as sanctuaries – not only for crocodiles but also for other endangered wildlife species in Palawan.”