RUTLAND HERALD (Vermont) 27 October 04 Go ahead, you can smile at a crocodile - Reptilian ruckus raisers possess personality, too (Natalie Angier, The New York Times)
Washington: To the casual observer, an adult alligator afloat in an algae-dappled pond, its 6-foot body motionless save for the sporadic darting of its devilish amber eyes, might conjure up any number of images, none of them fuzzy-wuzzy.
A souvenir dinosaur. A log with teeth. A handbag waiting to happen.
For Daphne Soares, however, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland, an alligator looks like nothing so much as a big, amphibious and grievously misunderstood kitten. Sure, it sports thick scales and bulging bony knobs called osteoderms rather than fur, and 80 teeth to the house cat's 30, and a tail that, as Soares learned from personal experience, can dislocate your jaw with a single whack.
But just look at the chubby belly, the splayed legs, the sunny smile that never sets!
"Oh, you are so cute, so adorable, I wish I could just pick you up and give you a hug!" Soares cooed to the alligators that obligingly posed for her at the National Zoo here on a recent weekday afternoon.
Soares, 32, who was raised in Rio de Janeiro by a Brazilian mother and an American father and who conveys a blend of high energy and droll ease, has worked with many species of Crocodylia, the reptilian order that includes crocodiles, alligators, caimans and gharials. And while she admires the entire crocodilian dynasty, alligators are her favorite.
"I absolutely love these creatures," she said. "They're beautiful, elegant and goofy at the same time."
They are also unmistakably observant, and as curious as, well, kittens. When Soares took a seat near the glass of the enclosure, the alligators paddled over for a close-up view.
"They get a bad rap for being stupid little reptiles," she said. "But they're very curious, very alert, and they want to know what's going on."
In fact, the reptiles are virtual newshounds, for whom the term "current events" holds particular meaning.
Soares, who specializes in neuroethology — the neural underpinnings of animal behavior — has lately discovered a kind of sixth sense unique to crocodilians, which are often referred to generically as crocodiles.
She has determined that the mysterious little bumps found around the jaws of some crocodile species and across the entire bodies of others, which naturalists had long observed but never before understood, are sensory organs exquisitely suited to the demands of a semi-submerged ambush predator.
The pigmented nodules encase bundles of nerve fibers that respond to the slightest disturbance in surface water and thus allow a crocodile to detect the signature of a potential meal — an approaching fish, a bathing heron, a luckless fawn enjoying its last lick of water.
The discovery of a novel sensory system is just one of a host of new findings about the prowess and performance of an impressively ancient and resilient clan. Crocodilians have toughed it out in one guise or another for 230 million years, some by land, others by sea, most astraddle, but all the while, stylishly crocodile.
As scientists are just beginning to appreciate, a croc's body plan — basically the same today as its ancestors' — is panzer, a tropical tank from the skin in. Beneath its scaly sheath and craggy osteoderms is another layer of armor, built of rows of bony overlapping shingles, or osteoscutes, that are both strong and flexible. And beneath that formidable barrier is an immune system that merits the modifier: It is virtually immune to defeat.
"Crocodiles have tremendous robustness against bacterial infection," Ross said. "The sort of wound that would leave any of us severely septicemic doesn't seem to touch them." That immunological ferocity has inspired researchers at the Johns Hopkins to begin screening crocodile blood in search of new antibiotics.
Crocodilians are also think tanks, and will engage in sophisticated behavior that leaves most reptiles in the cold. They vocalize to each other. They squabble over status and can distinguish between friendly hominid and annoying graduate student with dart gun. In caring for their young, they outcluck a mother hen, for what hen can protect her babies by carrying them in her jaw?
"They're not like big lizards," said George Amato, a geneticist at the Wildlife Conservation Society, a division of the Bronx Zoo. "It's clear when you spend time with them that they are quite complex."
Crocodiles hark back to another cast of beloved goliaths, the real ones called dinosaurs. The resemblance is not circumstantial. Through recent taxonomic analysis, scientists have concluded that dinosaurs, crocodiles and birds should be classified together on one branch of the great polylimbed Sequoia of Life.
Reptilian ruckus raisers possess personality, too