The planet has between 24 and 27 living crocodilian species. The number changes with the recent splits or reclassifications that you count. India has exactly three: the mugger, the saltwater crocodile and the gharial.
Only one place in the world has all three living side by side. It is a single district in Odisha. It was also the home of Kalia, a man-eating crocodile. His size became a legend.
Kendrapara and Bhitarkanika
Kendrapara is on the coast of Odisha. It is the only district in India where the mugger, the saltwater crocodile and the gharial all occur. Its main attraction is Bhitarkanika National Park. This park is a wild area of mangroves, tidal creeks and estuaries at the mouth of the Brahmani and Baitarani rivers.
Odisha started its crocodile conservation project at Bhitarkanika in 1975. The project was for all three species. For saltwater crocodiles, it was a very large success. In 1974 there were only 96 of them there. Today there are more than 1,800. Bhitarkanika alone now has about 70 to 75 percent of all the saltwater crocodiles in India.
The gharial part of the story is much weaker. Saltwater crocodiles have a breeding population in Kendrapara. Gharials do not.
Kendrapara got its "all three" status only in August 2021. That month, people saw a baby gharial in the Paika river. It was the first live gharial in the waters of the district. Before that, in 2018, people found only a dead gharial, nine feet long. These records show that gharials now come into the rivers of the district. They are probably wanderers from conservation populations upstream. But there is no fixed population yet.
Meet the three
The saltwater crocodile: the largest living reptile
Crocodylus porosus is the largest living reptile, in India and in the world. Large males can grow to 6 metres (about 20 feet). They can weigh more than a tonne. In India it has three main areas: Bhitarkanika, the Sundarbans, and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. In all of these places, the coast changes into mangrove and tidal creek.
The mugger: the one that uses tools
The mugger, or marsh crocodile, can live in many habitats. It lives in rivers, lakes, reservoirs and even village ponds in 15 Indian states. It is rarely longer than 4 to 5 metres. That is small for a saltwater crocodile.
In 2013, biologist Vladimir Dinets recorded a strange behaviour in India. Mugger crocodiles put small sticks and twigs across their snouts. Then they lay without movement near nesting colonies of herons and egrets. Birds came down to take the sticks for their nests. The crocodiles caught the birds instead. This was the first report of tool use in any reptile.
The gharial: the fish specialist
The gharial has a long and very thin snout. It has about 110 teeth that lock together. These teeth have one job: to catch fish with one fast sideways strike. The snout cannot do much else. That is why gharials almost never attack people, although they are among the largest crocodilians in the world.
Adult males grow a stranger feature too. It is a hollow, round growth at the tip of the snout. Its name is ghara, the Hindi word for a clay pot, because it looks like one. It is a resonating chamber. With it, males make a buzzing hiss that can go up to 75 metres underwater. The sound attracts females.
The gharial is also by far the most endangered of the three. It has been Critically Endangered since 2007. Scientists estimate that fewer than 900 adults are left in the wild.
The legend of Kalia, and the facts from his skull
The most famous crocodile of Bhitarkanika was a man-eater. He was a huge saltwater crocodile with dark skin, and people called him Kalia, "the dark one." For about 50 years, people blamed him for attacks on a part of the Dhamra river. The stories say that he killed between 13 and 20 people.
In 1926, somebody finally shot him. Villagers found bangles of his victims inside his body. Local stories said that he was 23 to 24 feet long.
In the 2000s, naturalist Romulus Whitaker and his colleagues measured the preserved skull again, with care. The length from snout to skull was 73.3 cm. Standard crocodile proportions give a body length of about 17.5 feet from this. That is still an enormous crocodile, but it is smaller than the legend.
A rare story with good news
Fifty years ago, all three crocodilians of India were moving toward extinction. Breeding and protection programmes started in the 1970s. Today Kendrapara has all three species, but the gharial is still not secure there.
