Top​​​​​​​ Of The Crocodile Pops​​​​​​​

Not only do India’s fish-eating gharials look strange, they make unusually attentive mums and dads. These reptiles are among the best in the world.

- Janaki Lenin

February fog blankets the wide River Chambal in northern India and shrouds from view the settlements along its banks. A new tension fills the air. Until now, one particularly impressive scarred 5m-long male gharial, sporting a magnificent bulbous lump called a ghara on the end of his long snout, has been civil. He has been lazing alongside his fellow gharials as their dark hides soak up the rays. But now, suddenly, he can’t bear the sight of another big male.

The rival reptiles rise out of the water with their snouts in the air, sizing each other up. They nip one another, taking the skin off the slender jaws. Blood oozes from puncture wounds in the ghara; the delicate snouts of gharials can’t withstand violent ramming. When neither animal backs off, the contest progresses to a wrestling match. The mighty combatants jostle for hours until one succeeds in mounting the other.

The defeated rival surges forwards in a serpentine movement, possibly to shake the other off his back. He concedes this round and watches the victor patrol his fiefdom. Snorting noisily, the dominant individual shows off his size by arching his back and his tail’s serrated horny plates, called scutes, above the water. The trounced male tests his mettle again and again over the next few days, until he finally realises that he cannot unseat the winner and gives up.

Female gharials watch the outcome of the titanic battle with keen interest, because the victorious male will father their offspring. But Jeffrey Lang, a retired professor of biology from the University of North Dakota, says it’s not so simple. Some females may not settle for just one mate, instead travelling along the river to visit other dominant males. In 2008 Lang founded the Gharial Ecology Project after a mysterious die-off the previous winter, when more than 100 gharials were found floating lifeless in the Chambal River.

UNCERTAIN FUTURE