My entire life I’ve lived a long distance from any large mass of water. I’ve visited both oceans that the United States comes in contact with. Water is not intimidating. I used to be a competitive swimmer. I still love being in the water, but there is something that makes the water not safe. It has been around since the dinosaurs. It is cold blooded and has black holes for eyes. The crocodile.
The extent of my interaction with crocodiles has been viewing them in zoos. Now before you start saying, “But Alex, crocs do not live in the United States (which by the way the do, along with alligators), they only live in water, you are never remotely near water that they could survive in” let me explain myself. Here in the United States, we also have alligators. They are the slightly smaller, less aggressive, but entirely more abundant, cousins of crocodiles. But here lies the issue, on four separate occasions, Nile (yes the river in Egypt) Crocodiles have been found in swamps in Florida. “That’s only four” you might say. But here’s why that is a problem. Per NatGeo and CrocBITE, “a worldwide crocodilian-attack database, American alligators and crocodiles account for 33 human fatalities since 2000. In the same time span, the Nile crocodile has killed 268 people.” Now let me put this in perspective. Two species of reptilian predators’ combined attacks make up just over 12% of one species of crocodiles human attack numbers. Now that they’ve arrived, our chance of attack just rose. Our chance of a watery, reptilian, tooth filled, death has just increased.
So here’s the thing. There’s also a species of crocodile named the saltwater crocodile. As the name might suggest, it can live in saltwater. However, it can also live in freshwater. Now, the majority of water on the planet is saltwater. So this predator has now exponentially grown its area of effect. Not to mention that it is also the world’s largest living crocodilian. To give you some numbers here, average size for the monsters is around 17 feet however some in the low to mid twenties have also been reported. Additionally, it is not uncommon for them to weigh at least a ton. That’s two thousand pounds at minimum. There is not a single human being who is getting that off of them. It also has the strongest jaw in the animal kingdom. They can bite down with roughly 3700 pounds per square inch. That’s more than twice what it takes to break a human’s femur (otherwise known as the strongest bone in our body.
And in the words of the legendary Billy Mays “BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!” They are also capable of reaching speeds of up to 20 mph on land. That’s right, even when they do not have the homefield advantage, chances are you tried to run and lost miserably. No wait, you probably didn’t have the chance to run because if you are seeing this behemoth, it is too late. They lay motionless for hours in the shallows of murky water just waiting for some poor soul to come near the water. They then spring up with blinding speed, trap their prey, drag them into the water, and proceed to drown/tear them. Here’s when we enter the realm of the crocodile. Here it will employ the deadliest of all its tactics, the death roll.
Picture this, you’re being held underwater, some part of your body is being held down by roughly 3700 pounds, and now you’re being spun around. To add onto blood loss, pain, and drowning, now you are completely disoriented. In other words, it’s over. You lose. The creature that survived whatever killed the dinosaurs is here and it’s real folks.
