UNIVERSITY STAR (Texas State U, San Marcos, Texas) 01 February 07 Wildlife biology department helps point crocodile toward home (Zach Halfin)
Researchers from Texas State are involved in an international attempt to identify the origin of an American Crocodile that swam to Grand Cayman from an unknown location.
The endangered American Crocodile, Crocodylus acutus, was forced from Grand Cayman around 1500 A.D. because of over-hunting shortly after Europeans came to the island.
Andrew Hope, Cayman Island department of environment marine enforcement officer, contacted Mike Forstner, associate professor in the department of biology, after a young male crocodile measuring more than 2 meters in length was found swimming into Old Man Bay Dec. 30.
Wildlife officials in Grand Cayman want to return the crocodile to its home and needed help from the Texas State wildlife biology department to determine where the crocodile was from.
“The folks in Cayman need an answer,” Forstner said. “They need to know what to do with this crocodile (and) this is the first step in helping them find what they need to do now. They are hoping for repatriation. They want to find out where it came from and take it back home.”
Forstner said that he thinks the crocodile was forced from Cuba, where crocodile populations are healthy.
“If it was in a population of crocs that had a lot of individuals in it, the big bull crocs are like, ‘Hey, I don’t like these little boys hanging around my ladies’, and they would have pushed him out and he would have had to have gone somewhere (else),” Forstner said.
“This crocodile is the Michael Jordan of swimming,” he said.
Forstner said swimming or rafting from island to island is likely the way the crocodile originally got to the island.
“A really big rock fell out of the sky 65 million years ago and smashed into Cancun,” Forstner said.
“When it did, it took out all life anywhere near it, and took the dinosaurs eventually. In the last 65 million years, crocodiles, which made it through that big purge, have reinhabited all of the Caribbean islands, and they had to do this by moving from one island to another. They where able to get to one island, then over time made it to the next island. We have seen the same thing with fruit flies in Hawaii and iguanas in the Caribbean.”
David Rodriguez, Texas State alumnus and Texas Tech doctoral student, has been working since 2005 on genetic markers that can identify the area where any American Crocodile may be from. He has worked with the Texas State wildlife biology program to compile genetic information from blood samples collected from individual crocs representing almost the entire range of crocodiles, and is currently writing his dissertation over the subject at Texas Tech.
“People will send us blood samples, and these samples come from Costa Rica, Mexico, Jamaica and Florida; from all over the range of these crocodiles,” Rodriguez said.
Acquiring the blood sample from Grand Cayman presents legal difficulties because it is against federal law to ship crocodile blood into the U.S. without a permit.
“I never would have predicted we would get a Grand Cayman crocodile, so Grand Cayman isn’t listed on any permits,” Forstner said. “It takes real time, like a year, to get an animal put on a permit so we ship the crocodile blood. In this case, the controls and regulations that protect endangered species make this really tough.”
To avoid the federal shipping rules involved in the international transportation of animal materials, the information used in testing for these genetic markers will be sent to Grand Cayman for analysis.
“We will supply the markers, they will generate the data, then we will put it into our data set and do the analysis,” Forstner said.
Researchers in Grand Cayman will use the markers supplied from Rodriguez’s research to determine what population of American Crocodile the captured one is from.
“There are genetic markers in crocodiles that are just like the markers found in people that can allow individual identification of animals just like you have seen in a murder mystery,” Forstner said.
Once the origin of the crocodile is found, Grand Cayman officials will determine what to do with the animal, but for now it is recovering from its capture at Boatswain’s Beach under the veterinary care of the Cayman Island department of environment.
The Texas State wildlife biology master’s program has conducted numerous successful studies relating to the conservation of endangered species.
Wildlife biology department helps point crocodile toward home