Guarding against those vicious jaws

In an effort to manage human-crocodile conflict, a university in Australia has formed a database to document attacks by crocodile species worldwide, including in India

The man-crocodilia conflict takes a big toll of lives every year, both human and reptilian. In an effort to manage this conflict, the Charles Darwin University in Northern Territory, Australia, has come up with a first-of-its-kind database that lists attacks by crocodilians worldwide. Even a lay person who has information about such an attack can log in and report it.

"How can people be expected to conserve or tolerate crocodiles in the wild if they see them as nothing but a dangerous pest?" asks Australian shark and crocodile expert Adam Britton. "Addressing this, and improving safety for people living in crocodile habitats is the main goal of CrocBITE."

Britton, who is the coordinator of the database, adds, "The CrocBITE approach with the open source and freely-accessible database was mostly inspired by the International Shark Attack File, which catalogues every reported shark attack on a person. Our objectives are similar: to use existing information about animal attacks on people, look for patterns and trends in the attacks, and learn from these examples to improve management, awareness and safety. We also want to take this further, to provide wildlife managers with a data analysis tool to help guide management plans."

The database will include information from India, which is home to two species of crocodilia. The mugger or marsh crocodile is found all across the country, while the bigger, deadlier, saltwater crocodile makes its home in coastal Odisha, the Sundarbans and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

How would compiling data about crocodilia attacks help in preventing such attacks in the long run? Romulus Whitaker, founder of the Madras Crocodile Bank and a contributor to the database, explains, "The main point of compiling such data is to pin down the conflict locations so that mitigating action can be focused on places of likely attacks."

But in a developing country like India, where Internet penetration is still low, how would a person who is not computer-savvy report an attack? "I do not see an issue in this at all," says Bivash Pandav from the Wildlife Institute of India's Department of Endangered Species Management. "Most of the information on crocodile attacks on humans is available at the level of the divisional forest officer. At the moment most, if not all, divisional forest offices in the country have access to the Net."

To submit data about a crocodile attack, a person must apply for and get access to a password-protected account. Upon logging in, the contributor can fill in an incident report form and submit it for review by authorised users, who might ask for further clarifications, reject the submission, or add it to the official database.

But how would the CrocBITE team independently verify the information about the incident/attack submitted to it from all across the globe? Explains Britton: "We need to see evidence when a person creates an account that he or she is qualified to provide that information. So, in many cases our contributors would already be crocodile specialists, or people who work in government departments and NGOs. We can often cross-check submissions with other reports, but we tend to give more weight to reports filed by qualified individuals. We do occasionally receive reports from other people, generally survivors already listed in the database who provide more information on the circumstances of a particular incident. Sometimes we have to make a judgment call if a story doesn't make sense (for example, if they report crocodile behaviour that is unrealistic)."

The experts who oversee the database say that their effort would be to ensure factual information as far as possible, while admitting that each report that comes in might not be 100 per cent accurate. But they hope that, in the nature of statistics, the volume of information will help to filter such outliers.