KUENSEL (Thimpu, Bhutan) 29 December 06 More room mate! (Kinley Wangmo)
Phuentsholing: Thirty years after it was set up the crocodile farm in Phuentsholing may finally be able to breed the highly endangered Gharial alligator.
A new concrete pond, bigger and deeper, than the existing one at the farm, is nearing completion and will provide the much-needed space for a male and a female Gharial to mate in peace.
The new pond was built on the suggestions of experts to encourage mating.
The new pond is two metres deep, 13 metres long and and 11.5 metres wide. A full-grown alligator weighs about 300 kilogrammes and is about 12 feet in length. They reach sexual maturity at the age of 7 to 8 years.
“The existing pond is not deep enough for mating, during which there is a lot of movement,” said the farm in-charge, B P Dahal of forestry services. All the six alligators, three males and three females, share the same pond. There are four other ponds in the 35 decimal area farm, which is occupied by 12 female and three male mugger crocodiles.
Fishes are also bred in these ponds mainly as food for the reptiles.
In 1976 four Gharials caught from the Manas region were brought to Phuentsholing and a farm started for conservation of the species, along with five mugger crocodiles, according to the farm in-charge.
But so far the farm had not seen the female alligators lay a single egg.
There were plans to breed and raise the reptile and release them in the rivers in the country’s foothills, where the reptiles once lived but had became extinct in the 1970s because of extreme poaching.
In 2000, two male Gharials were brought to the farm from a national park in Nepal when the reptile did not breed. It was thought that there were no male Gharial present. “After the two reptiles were brought in, one of the Gharials from the earlier group started showing signs of being a male,” said the farm in-charge.
The male Gharial is differentiated from the female by their swollen tip of its elongated snout. Females have an almost plain elongated snout.
With the new mating pool almost ready the farm is optimistic of seeing some alligator eggs. A Gharial usually lays about 35 to 60 eggs in March, April or May and the incubation period of the eggs is between 60 to 80 days.
Meanwhile the breeding of the mugger crocodile was suspended from 2004, mainly because of space constraint. “The young ones usually need to be raised in a separate pond,” said the in-charge. Besides the expenses incurred on buying food for the reptile was also increasing.
Moreover, the mugger crocodile is also seen as a dangerous and violentºreptile and therefore, unlike the Gharial, the reptile will not be released into the rivers but only conserved in the farm. According to the caretaker the crocodiles have been breeding healthily.
The crocodiles have laid around 200 eggs so far, of which 50 hatched and 10 survived in the past 24 years. Currently there are 15 crocodiles at the farm.
The incharge told Kuensel that in 2004 a proposal was put up to the Nature Conservation Division for the farm to be relocated to bigger andºsuitable area with a good water source.
Officials have sighted a favourable area in Krabreytar in Phuentsholing but plans such as the number of ponds have not been made.
The farm started receiving international assistance in 2002-2003 during which the World Wildlife Fund helped strengthen the wire meshing around the farm, improve the caretaker’s quarters within the premises of the farm, and build bigger and new ponds and well managed corridors between the ponds.
B P Dahal said that a proposal was also put up to make the farm a recreational centre for people to visit for a nominal fee.
“It would help buy food and maintain the farm,” said B P Dahal. Currently about Nu. 20,000 to Nu. 25, 000 is spent in a month to feed the reptiles.
The Gharials are fed about 12 kilogrammes of fish on alternate days while the mugger crocodiles are fed 30 kilogrammes of beef after every two days.
The farm receives more than a hundred visitors everyday, mostly Indian tourists from across the border.
*The Croc-Man*
Ram Bahadur Chhetri, 49, might not have battled crocodiles and alligators in the wild like the legendary crocodile hunter Steve Irwin but he has fed, raised and lived with over a dozen of them for the past 24 years. He considers them his children.
“Every time I step out of the farm or when I have to go somewhere leaving the farm in someone else’s hands I cannot stop thinking about them,” he said. “I keep wondering if they have been fed.”
Having lived with them for so long Ram Bahadur knows the characteristics of the two reptiles and can read their body language to know whether they mean harm or not.
“The crocodile is the naughty one,” he said. “If they see you wandering about the pond they lash out at you from the pond. It is in their nature to do so.”
The alligators were mild compared with the crocodiles, he said. “Only if they were really hungry then they would lash out, that also only during feeding.”
The reptiles might have lashed out at Ram Bahadur a few times but he was never attacked. And it was only during the initial years when he was getting trained to handle the reptiles that he was frightened of the reptiles.
Ram lives in a quarter inside the farm with his family.
Status profile - Historically, the gharial was abundant in all the large river systems of the Indian sub-continent. Its range extended throughout the Gangetic plain, west to the Indus River in Pakistan, north and north-east to Nepal and Bhutan, east to Burma, and south to Orissa in India (Neill 1971). The gharial is now restricted to scattered, isolated population in India, Nepal and Bangladesh. It has been reported to be extinct in Burma and Pakistan (Behura and Singh 1978).
More room mate!