crocodiles – bobmcgee

Eventful …

The last post featured birds at Streeters Jetty. I had company while I was there although I saw no sign of it. The area was closed for a few days. It was caught and turned out to be 3 meters long. It is now a resident at the Malcolm Douglas Wildlife Park. Some photos shamelessly filched off the internet …

I hope you enjoyed the gallery of birds that I risked life and limb to bring you. There may not be another for a while. The autofocus on my beautiful 200 to 600mm Sony lens has given up the ghost. An opportunity to buy a new lens! At least I’m trying to look at it that way.

It rained yesterday. Just a few millimeters. It was about 4.45 in the afternoon. It took a while to work out how to turn on the windscreen wipers it’s been so long. After the rain the temperature dropped to a mere 26°C. Overnight temperatures have been higher than that in recent days. It was too late and too little to avoid this being a record. Forget living memory. It is now the driest start to the wet since records began in 1939.

But at least we have cloud. I was out just prior to dawn. This was Town Beach.

Crocodile …

We stopped shooting them in 1970. According to an Australian Geographic article they went from fewer than 3000 to 100,000 by 2016 in the Northern Territory alone. There are probably half as many again in the adjacent states, WA and Queensland. They are becoming more numerous and, as the population ages , they are getting bigger.

Broome’s Cable Beach has been closed a couple of times in the last couple of months because of croc sightings. Town Beach is another spot that gets the occasional visit. Beaches, though, are not their preferred habitat, when they are seen there they are just traveling through. It’s in the mangroves, creeks and near coastal lakes that you need to keep a sharp look out. Not that they advertise. The top photo shows just eyes and nostrils. They can hold that position indefinitely. If they want to be really sneaky they can submerge and still see you perfectly well. A crocodile can hold its breath for an hour or more.

Estuarine Crocodiles Crocodylus prosus live up to 70 years, grow up to 6 metres in length and weigh more than half a tonne. They will eat any animal they find in the water or at the water’s edge, so mainly fish with the odd cow, dog or human. Males are territorial and extremely aggressive. They are not gentle with their partners when they mate.

If you are visiting Broome take care near the water.

The safe way to see crocodiles is at the Malcolm Douglas Crocodile Park where all the photos in this post were taken. The way in is through the only crocodile mouth you want to enter … ever. In the park there are plenty of Salties and a collection of other crocodilians including Australian Freshwater Crocodiles, North American Alligators, South American Caimans and a New Guinean freshwater croc. The tour is included in the entry price, feeding is at 3 pm and you can play with a baby croc if that takes your fancy. I enjoyed my visit but would say that it is not well set up for the photographer.

A Spurious Correlation …

Climate changes, there’s no doubt about it. The overall trend since 1659 when the Central England temperature series begins has been upward. Indeed the world is about a degree warmer now than it was 360 years ago. In certain quarters this has caused considerable alarm.

It is worth noting that the world was a lot warmer during the Cretaceous and a lot cooler during the ice ages of the recent geologic past.

Every day there seems to be a new disaster awaiting us because of climate change. Any minute now we will drown and/or fry while having to forgo coffee. In the last couple of weeks it has been the turn of the crocodiles. The problem for them is that the gender of their offspring is determined by the temperature at which the eggs are incubated. Change the world’s temperature and all the baby crocodiles will be female and the species soon extinct.

It has often been the case that data has been tortured until it yields the result desired. The motivation has often been another grant or to fill the coffers of some activist organisation.

Returning to the point, at a certain temperature sweet spot crocodile eggs hatch to be a good mix of boys and girls. At extremes either up or down they tend to be girls.

The first crocodilians appear in the fossil record about 20 million years ago. Modern crocodiles are Eusuchians, a group that appears more recently, about 120 million years ago. This was the Cretaceous. Tropical oceans were about 10°C warmer than they are today. Their descendants survived the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs and three-quarters of the world’s plant and animal species. And the fluctuating cycles of the ice ages.

They have demonstrated a certain resilience but can they survive another Democrat President?

From the website Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science comes another instance of extreme cruelty to data …

I was looking at the global temperature record and noticed an odd correlation the other day. Basically, I calculated the temperature trend for each presidency and multiplied by the number of years to get a “total temperature change”. If there was more than one president for a given year it was counted for both. I didn’t play around with different statistics to measure the amount of change, including/excluding the “split” years, etc. Maybe other ways of looking at it yield different results, this is just the first thing I did.

It turned out all 8 administrations who oversaw a cooling trend were Republican. There has never been a Democrat president who oversaw a cooling global temperature. Also, the top 6 warming presidencies were all Democrats.

Supported by this set of graphs, unintelligible at this scale so forget reading it on your phone. On a real computer or even a tablet selecting it might enlarge it enough to give you a laugh …