Crocodile Crock: March 1, 2009

In which we study the curious crocodile.

Categorized

Animals

Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PloverCrocodileSymbiosis.jpg I have been reading about crocodiles lately — and by “lately” I mean “today”, and by “crocodiles” I mean “not alligators”. This is a very important differentiation, because you need to be sure you’re screaming out the correct species name when you’re getting your arm torn off in a swamp. If you use the wrong term, you will be known as “Stumpy McMoron” for the rest of your life.

But anyway. Quit screaming and hold still, or you’ll miss all the lovely crocodile facts I have garnered from Wikipedia for you:

Crocodiles will stalk you.
And not just in the track-you-through-the-bushes kind of way, either. According to Wikipedia:

Crocodiles are adept at learning and memorizing routines, such as the location of nearby campers or the routes of travelers.

Not only will they follow you, crocodiles will learn you. They will learn where you live, where you work, and where you jog in the mornings. They will take notes on your routine. They will take pictures of you and cut out the bits they like to make a giant collage on the wall of their dingy studio apartment. They will call up your favorite DJ and ask him to play Every Breath You Take each afternoon at 5:10, so that you’ll hear it on your drive home from work. They will leave chewed-up Barbie dolls on your doorstep, dressed in clothes like the ones you’re wearing right now. When the phone rings in the night and there’s no sound on the line but heavy breathing and the chirrup of tooth-cleaning birds, those are the crocodiles. They want you.

Crocodiles cannot stick out their tongues.
This is due to a certain membrane which holds their tongue in place. I think this explains why crocodiles are always killing people: they are so, so angry, all the time, and they have no way of expressing their emotions except through rage. They can’t make faces and harmlessly mock their enemies, like people can. And if a person sticks their tongue out at a crocodile, what’s a reptile to do? That’s just mocking the disabled, and that hurts their feelings. So they take the tongue-sticker down into a deathroll, all the while wishing that they just had the tools to communicate their feelings of helplessness. And then they cry while they eat, because all they can taste is self-loathing. Crocodile tears are the saddest tears.

There are crocodiles in Florida.
This kind of floors me (kind of — I’m not actually going to sit on the floor, because that’s where the crocodiles get you), because I grew up in Florida and always thought that there were only alligators down there. Now I find that my mother was actually being very remiss in only warning me not to get eaten by alligators, when she should have been adding “… and American crocodiles, of course, of which there is a remnant population of less than 1,200 in the United States.” Obviously, my mother wanted me dead, and may even have hired a hit-crocodile to kill me. But apparently she repented of this — that, or the hit-croc was an undercover cop-croc and did not make the hit — and decided to keep me safe from American crocodiles forever by moving me north to Minnesota, which was a good decision because…

American crocodiles hate the cold.
And by “hate,” I mean “get all dead in,” meaning that they can’t handle cold as well as American alligators and will freak out, whining and borrowing sweaters and constantly hinting that the party should move inside and eventually being rendered helpless and drowning. American alligators like to make fun of American crocodiles because of this intolerance, but American crocodiles get their own back by growing faster and being more tolerant of salt water. These differences help control the spread of reptile gangs, because the crocs take the salt water and the gators take the cold water. This does not, however, prevent them from taunting each other across their respective boundaries, as the following exchange (recorded by marine biologists) demonstrates:

Gator: Hey! Hey, croc! Your mother ----s bull sharks!
Croc: ---- you, mother----er, you come over here and say that!
Gator: You come over here, shoeskin! Whassa matter, can’t stand the cold?
Croc: Bitch, it be too salty up in here for your short-tailed ass!
Manatee: HEY ASS----ERS! I’M-A BUST A KELP IN YA SCALY ASS BLOW YOU OUTTA DA WATER BITCHES I RUNS YOU OVER LIKE A MOTORBOAT! NOW ------ THE ---- OUTTA MY GODDAMN SINK, ELSE I ------ YOU IN THE ------ WITH A ---- AN’ YO MOMMA’S ----- ----- ------- AN’ A STARFISH!!!

In 1945, during the Battle of Ramree Island, the Japanese army discovered a new enemy: crocodiles.
Or not, depending on who you talk to — some people claim that the crocodile attacks never happened. I prefer to believe the crocodile story, because it a) provides a gruesome counterpart to the story of the Indianapolis, and b) is just grosser than death by dehydration. If it did happen, it is one of the worst animal attacks of all time, maybe even worse than the time my friends’ chihuahua tried to hump my leg and ruined my new pleather boots. Here’s the story:

On the Pacific island of Ramree, invading British troops engaged the occupying Japanese forces in combat. With the British having taken one of their strongholds, the Japanese troops abandoned the fight for that particular stronghold and set off across the island to join forces with a larger Japanese battalion; their route took them across 16 kilometers of swampland, which was home to thousands of saltwater crocodiles. 1,000 Japanese soldiers entered this jungle, ignoring repeated calls from the British to surrender; throughout the night, the horrible screams of the men echoed through the tropical air as they were seized in massive jaws and dragged beneath the muddy waters to their deaths. When the British finally moved in on the swamp, they found only 20 men left alive, surrounded by hundreds of still-hungry crocodiles… like the one RIGHT BEHIND YOU!

Trust me: if you had read that sitting next to a campfire, it would have killed.