An ancient beast with razor sharp teeth. It can swim as fast as fish and a quick
bite to match. This is the incredible gharial. Hi, I’m Danielle Dufault and you’re watching
Animalogic. The gharial is one of the most specialized and rarest cr ocodilians in the world.
Like it’s ancient cousins they have been on earth for over a hundred million years and shared the
planet with dinosaurs of the Cretaceous. India and Nepal, where they share their
territory with the thicker mugger crocodiles. Their most unique feature is their long
thin snout with a little bulb at the end. This is an adaptation to hunt.
Gharials, are fish specialists and need to have a quick bite to catch agile aquatic
prey. Their thin snout cuts through the water with little water resistance.
Wide-snouted crocs have stronger bites but aren’t nearly as fast as gharials.
Other crocodilians such as the Malayan false gharial, which lacks a bulb
at the end of the snout, pescatarians but none are as large and fast as the gharial.
It’s like the difference between rowing with oars and rowing with a sword.
Gharials have weaker bites than smaller crocodiles but that doesn’t mean they’re
not lethal. They have over 100 needle-like teeth. They interlock like a zipper,
trapping fish in the gharials mouth. Gharials usually ambush their prey but
they have also been observed rapidly shaking their head to catch fish. They also eat other
aquatic prey such as crustaceans and frogs, especially when young. There are reports of
gharials catching small dogs and goats, but fish make the vast majority of their diet.
Gharials don’t attack people, but sometimes they do eat dead bodies.
In some cultures of their range, funeral traditions include releasing
dead bodies into the river. Gharials take advantage of this for an easy meal.
This doesn’t mean that you should approach them. Gharials are huge. They’re larger than
Nile and American crocodiles. Males are about 4.5 m long on average, with
some size kings getting to over 6 m in length. They’re not too keen to see you either. In fact,
they don’t like to encounter any large land animals at all.
They’re the most aquatic of all large crocodilians and spend most of their life in the water. They
only come out to raise their core temperature and prefer small river islands over the river banks.
And it’s not hard to see why they prefer the water. Their arms are relatively weak
and can’t lift their own weight and unlike other crocodilians they can’t sprint on land.
But under water they’re extremely agile. Their webbed feet and long flattened
tail give them great swimming power. Their bulb at the tip of their nose is
also an adaptation for life underwater. It lacks bones or cartilage but it has
chambers that act as a resonator. They can make a popping noise to
communicate with other gharials as far as 500 m away. Their sound is unique to each gharial,
which makes it easier for them to know who’s saying what. Males also use it to make a
far-reaching buzzing noise to call females. During courtship they blow bubbles,
which females apparently find adorable. Only males have this bulb, which makes
gharials the only sexually dimorphic crocodilian. They start growing them before they’re sexually
mature, when they’re about 10 years old. The bulb resembles an Indian clay pot
called a ghara, which gives gharials their name. After copulation the female travels up to 200 km
upstream to find breeding sites and makes a nest near the river bank and lays her eggs.
Gharials make the largest eggs among crocodilians, they’re about the size of baseball and they
usually lay around 40 eggs per clutch. In some cases they can lay a lot more. The highest number
ever recorded was 97. Imagine carrying 97
baseballs inside you. No thank you! When the babies hatch the call their mom,
who digs their nest out and points them toward the water. Other crocodilians carry
their babies to safety, but gharial snouts are too chainsaw-like to do it safely.
Then the females and a male will take care of the babies until the monsoon season. The male
is not necessarily their father, and younger males often protect other males’ babies.
This might be kind of a parenthood internship until they’re large enough to establish
themselves as dominant breeding males. In the meantime, they often carry them on
their back to protect them. Scientists believe that this is one of the cutest things on Earth,
and I couldn’t agree more. They’re so smol! Despite their apparent prodigious fertility,
gharials are critically endangered. Populations have crashed in the past
hundred years are less than 5% of what they used to be at the beginning of the 20th century.
Studies in the 70s showed that there were just over 200 breeding adults in the whole world.
Since then there have been conservation efforts that involve breeding gharials
in captivity and releasing babies in the wild. Unfortunately numbers haven’t improved as expected
and there are still under 1000 adults in the wild. Habitat destruction due to mining and dam
construction, Gill net fishing, and water contamination are the main reasons most
re-introduced gharials never reach maturity. Efforts to restore gharial populations are still
ongoing, and hopefully with improved environmental conditions these speedy swimming chainsaws
will be restored to their former glory. Hey guys, Danielle from the future here,
and I have big news. If you’ve ever wanted to take home my illustrations for Animalogic, now you can.
We just launched the official Animalogic Merch store! On it you can find the Animalogic Artbook,
which features 99 original illustrations by yours truly,
from recent episodes, all the way back to when we first started.
You can also take home a beautiful Anialogic poster designed by artist Conrado Salinas,
as well as a sticker set featuring my favourite illustrations of reptilians.
And there’s more to come! Available for pre-order is a montage-poster and a mug with a beautiful
wrap-around design, both featuring many of my original illustrations for Animalogic.
If you want to support the show and take home some of my favourite scientific illustrations,
head on over to standard.tv/animalogic.
I really hope you like them!
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