General: Crocodiles know much more than we think

A while back, I managed to catch the tail end of the reptiles series that Sir David Attenborough created. If you have a spare 3 1/2 minutes, take a look at the end of his Life in Cold Blood series episode about crocodiles.

People seem to think crocodiles are cold, unintelligent eating machines. I have a major respect for them. They’ve been around since the time of the dinosaurs, and anything that can do that, is doing something right. In fact, until we arrived with guns, etc. they really didn’t have much to worry about. They were a top-level predator.

David’s video clearly shows they doing something that I’d suggest that more than 99% of humans couldn’t do, even with pen, paper and a calculator with weeks of notice and a library at their disposal. One night per year, salmon come down the river, and the night before that, these huge crocodiles line themselves up under the waterfalls and sit and wait for the fish. Normally, you’d never see a bunch of them working together either. They’d be trying to tear each other apart. But in this situation, they happily line up side by side.

What fascinates me is how they sense when to do this, given the combination of events happens so infrequently. Yet they arrive and set aside their territorial squabbles for just a day or two at exactly the right time. It could be something they sense in the water but we don’t know.

Crocodiles have always intrigued me. I grew up not too far from Steve Irwin’s place at Beerwah. I used to visit there back in the days when his parents had a reptile farm there. Whatever anyone ever thought of Steve, if you watched him in action, in person, I have never seen anyone more mesmerising. I couldn’t believe he was in where he was, let alone doing what he was doing. The guys that worked for him were really good, but he was in a class of his own.

Clearly, there’s a lot more to this world that we don’t understand yet. That’s what I love about science. It’s not the answers that are the best part, it’s the questions. I sense that we know so very little as yet.

2026-04-20