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CNN (Atlanta, Georgia) 27 January 05 Crocs terrorize African villagers
Namalinde, Malawi (Reuters): Maria Semu holds back tears as she tells how she lost her husband, Ngalu, to a crocodile -- another victim of growing conflict between man and beast in one of Africa's poorest countries.
"He went fishing at the river to catch fish for supper but did not come back," she said beneath a tree in front of her simple mud hut.
A search party found some of his remains and a large crocodile lurking in the vicinity was shot by the local police -- but it dived into the water and they are not sure if they finished it off.
January is prime time for crocodile attacks on humans in Malawi.
The females have spent much of the past three months guarding their nests so they enter the New Year ravenous.
And while there are no hard statistics, there are concerns that crocodile attacks are on the rise in this poor southern African country as swelling rural populations encroach on the reptile's habitat.
Depleted stocks of wild fish -- a crocodile's first choice of food -- is seen as one factor behind attacks.
At a shabby outdoor market about 2 km (1.2 miles) from where Semu's husband was taken on the banks of the Shire river earlier this month, the smoked fish on display comes from neighboring Mozambique, underscoring the dearth of fish in local waters.
"Over fishing is driving crocodiles to eat people," said Khalid Hassen, who knows crocs better than most people.
A professional hunter, Hassen has shot an astounding 17,000 crocodiles during the past 40 years in Malawi.
He once did it for commercial reasons -- sometimes shooting as many as 800 in a season for their skins -- but he now just shoots a few "because I feel I owe something to the communities where I got my start."
By this he means that he feels duty-bound to remove a few dangerous predators each year from the midst of poor villagers.
Hassen said he has always harvested crocodiles in a "sustainable" manner -- not hunting when they are nesting, not taking animals less than five feet (1.5 meters) in length -- and the meat he has provided to rural communities gives them some incentive to tolerate the big reptiles.
Hassen said no proper surveys of Malawi's crocodile population had been done but there was general agreement that the country has many.
Malawi has few lions and leopards left, but because they are cold-blooded, crocodiles require far less food than warm-blooded predators and so their population density is much higher.
Hassen said conflict between humans and crocodiles was also being provoked because subsistence peasant farmers were moving onto fertile marshlands -- superb crocodile habitat -- to plant maize.
"The crocodiles nest from October to December, when it is very hot and dry. The females guard the nest and so they don't hunt or eat then. So by January they are starving," Hassen said.
"If you had a graph, you would see that most attacks on humans happen between January and March," he said.
Police spokesman Willie Mwaluka said that there "were lots of reported crocodile attacks at this time of the year."
Kasisi Katunga, the traditional leader at Semu's village, Namalinde, also said that the attacks appeared to be seasonal.
Another man survived a savaging by a crocodile a few days after Semu's husband was taken and is recovering in hospital.
"The crocodiles are a menace in this area," he said.
But on the river bank where Ngalu Semu was snatched, life goes on.
A woman and her child bathe and wash clothes while two young men sit with bamboo fishing poles hoping for a strike.
"I have to come here. There's no water in the village," said the woman as she walked up the muddy bank, a basket full of freshly washed clothes perched on her head.
Katunga said piped water would eliminate the need for people to go to the river for such tasks.
Namalinde is on a paved road -- a rarity in Malawi -- and is barely 60 km (37 miles) south of the country's commercial capital Blantyre.
Crocs terrorize African villagers

Very interesting story there.
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