Asian Crocodiles to Swim in Tiger River

The San Diego Zoo’s Tiger River exhibit Friday became home to a pair of 7-foot gharials, toothy crocodiles native to Asia.

This is the first time in San Diego Zoo history that gharials, an endangered species, have been exhibited, zoo spokesman Jeff Jouett said.

“They’re one of the rarest of all crocodilians,” said Susan Schafer, assistant curator of reptiles and amphibians. “The fact that they’re so unusual-looking will make them of interest. Their bodies look like regular crocodiles’, but their snouts are really long and narrow, and they have big bug eyes, much like a fish.”

The gharials, a male and female, are 8 years old, Jouett said.

The crocodiles were flown to San Diego on Friday from the St. Augustine Alligator Farm in Florida, where they were raised. They were captive-hatched from eggs collected in Nepal, Schafer said.

“We suspect they will be more active, so they’ll be more interesting to watch than the other crocodile we had in here that would often just sit at the bottom of the pool,” Schafer said.

The gharials have paddle-like legs and long, narrow teeth, Schafer said, enabling them to specialize in swimming and catching fish.

Gharials--the sole living representative of a crocodile family that arose 65 million years ago--declined to as few as 100 animals in the 1970s. Although still classified as an endangered species, they have made a comeback from the brink of extinction in the last 15 years, Jouett said.

Strict conservation measures, including captive hatching of wild-collected eggs and returning 4-foot-long babies to sanctuaries in India, Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh, have brought the wild gharial numbers up to several thousands, Jouett said.

He said the zoo’s new pair should reach sexual maturity in about two years. “We may expect breeding from the pair in the next couple of years,” he said.

Male gharials grow to more than 21 feet in length. Their thin, elongated snouts are topped by a bulbous, pot-like tip when they reach sexual maturity, Schafer said.

Only four other zoos in the United States exhibit the animal, she said.