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Published: January 31st 2011
Hartleys Crocodile Farm
Northern Australia has lots and lots of crocodiles that live in the river and the creeks and even the sea. When we arrived in Cairns there were lots of warnings telling us not to swim in the sea as there were crocodiles just waiting in the water to eat you. Can you imagine that at Nairn Beach?
We decided to explore and learn a bit more about them by going to a crocodile center. We set off to Hartleys Crocodile Farm about an hour away from our hotel. It was very hot today at about 38 degrees.
Hartleys is an amazing place with a huge big lagoon surrounded by tropical jungle everywhere. The main part of the visit is a long boat ride through the swampy lagoon where you see all the crocodiles swimming under the boat. They look really really lazy but then if the keeper dangled some food from the side of the boat the crocodiles would jump 12 feet in the air and give you a fright. All the sides of the boat are covered in metal so there is no way that the crocs can get you. The biggest crocodile there was
called Big Ted and he was over 7 feet long. We learned that there were lots of types of crocodile too like the American Aligator and the Estuarine Crocodile (salt water crocodile).
We saw a live Crocodile show where the keeper was just meters from the Crocodile and was teasing him with food. When their jaws snap together is makes a really really loud snap sound. He talked us though lots of facts on crocodiles
Hartleys mainly has Estuarine Crocs and there are 17 in the lagoon. Only 3 are males. We learned that it is impossible to tell the age of a crocodile until it is dead. When you cut it open it has rings like a tree on its bones that allows you to tell its age. We also learned that no one really knows how long a croc will live as we have not been monitoring them for long enough.
Other great things that we learned about crocodiles is that they will not eat you until you are dead. To kill a big thing like a cow they will drag it under the water and drown it, holding it in its big jaws with almost
3000lbs of pressure per square inch in its bite. A shark on ly has about 900lbs of pressure per square inch in its bite so I think that a crocodile is pretty powerful.
Crocodiles don’t actually eat everything that they kill. Their stomach is only the size of their head. They kill big things so that they use what they don’t eat washed up on the side of a river. This attracts other animals and then when the croc is hungry again it will pounce on the fresh animal. Crocs prefer fresh food. A croc can also go without eating for 6 months.
There are about 6 people killed every year by crocodiles in Australia. The keeper said that this is usually because people are being stupid and not listening to the warnings of where to swim and not to swim.
Hartleys is also a working crocodile farm. Only about 1 % of crocodiles survive in the wild and there is a big demand for the skins of crocodiles to make leather goods like handbags. Australians have been farming crocodiles rather than taking them from the wild to meet this demand. The eggs are taken from the
mummy crodiles and then incubated and hatched. About 200 babies live together until it is time for them to be taken and killed for their skin. This is about when they are 3 years old.
We sat and had dinner on the jetty over the swamp and Big Ted came and settled right underneath our table. We could see him in the cracks in the boards. It was quite amazing and really scary at the same time
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Supercroc Warriors
Supercroc warriors, the science fiction graphic novel by Craig Frank Crowley has released a short video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjI6O-pBqqA