THE AGE (Melbourne, Australia) 23 November 07 Amazonia's Giant Jaws (Brad Newsome)
A beautiful doco about a magnificent creature that snacks on piranhas and even takes down the odd jaguar or sloth when it gets hungry.
They grow 'em pretty big in Brazil. The black caiman, a crocodile-type beastie that lurks beneath the waters of the Amazon and its tributaries, can be more than four metres long and, as we're repeatedly reminded here, can weigh as much as 453 kilograms. Why such a precise number of kilos? Ah, that would be 1000 pounds, and nobody's bothered to round off the metric conversion. Never mind - it's a beautiful doco about a magnificent creature that snacks on piranhas and even takes down the odd jaguar or sloth when it gets hungry.
The documentary follows the trials and triumphs of a female caiman as she migrates to a permanent dry-season lake and lays her clutch of eggs. Mothering turns out to be a full-time job, with monkeys, lizards and various other critters being partial to eggs for breakfast, and even when the hatchlings hit the water, mum has to take care they don't get snaffled by piranhas and such. Relatively few hatchlings make it to maturity, and even those that do have no guarantee of living to breed. Caiman are hunted for meat and skins, and those that hang around houses waiting for food scraps are - harsh as it may seem - pretty much asking for it. An interview with a lad who lost his leg reminds us that people have to live here too.
Amazonia's Giant Jaws