Reptile Rendezvous

 By Rebecca Samuel.

 A young participant on the Reptile Biology Workshop '10!

 Madras Crocodile Bank

 Last weekend, while most of my friends were sleeping, facebooking or watching American Idol, I was wallowing in croc muck, wrapping pythons around my  neck, measuring baby turtles, and enjoying every minute.

I was a part of a group that would be staying at the Madras Crocodile Bank for three days to learn more about the fascinating reptiles housed there.

We reached there really early in the morning and slept for a couple of hours.

Now I don’t know about you … but when I’m staying at a Crocodile park with gharials, Caimans and muggers for neighbors … curiosity overtakes exhaustion quite rapidly.

I got out of bed, had a cold bath, slipped my sweatshirt on and went outside.

After breakfast, Soham, the assistant curator of MCBT took us round the whole park and told us about the different species, the breeding patterns, and their overly complicated scientific names.

We measured Batagur Kachuga hatchlings in the morning, after lunch we cleaned a croc pit and rescued fish from among the weeds and muck with our hands while two guys poured more slush over us!

That evening we learnt about turtle taxonomy and the names of the different parts of their shell.

After dinner, we walked through the park again … looked into the glinty eyes of the crocs and found, in my opinion the prettiest snake ever, the vine snake.

The next day, we got up at around 4 AM and went for a snake walk with the coolest people of all time …. The Irulas.The Irulas are basically snake catchers from in and around Tamil Nadu.

The four deadly snakes around there are the Kraits, Russels vipers, Sawscale vipers, and, of course, Cobras, together known as the Big 4.

The Government now allows the Irula to extract Venom from only one snake of each of the Big 4 every month.

We saw two Rat snakes, a Russels viper, and two Sawscale vipers.

After the walk, we had breakfast and nimbu paani and then watched Ally the alligator, Pintoo the salty, and a bunch of other crocs come when they were called, sit, lie down and even jump !! Soham had trained these crocs to respond to their name, and do a load of other awesome stuff as I just told you. They were also trained to respond to colour, yellow indicates positive commands, like come, sit, etc., while blue indicates negative commands like go into the water and such.

After the crocs showed us that their not just big ole’ rocks who have negligible intelligence, we went off to play redecorator with the Batagur Kachuga turtle’s pen.

We made erosion barriers by digging small trenches and placing logs in them. We planted grass and some plants as well.

That evening, we learnt the names of the different scales on a snake using live baby pythons for reference!!

Later on, after some more nimbu paani, we watched a documentary on gharials called

‘Crocodile Blues’ which was about the plight that gharials faced and their close shave with extinction.

The gharials are largely found in the Chambal River system and the Katernia Ghat system. As they are primarily riverine organisms, any harm caused to these two river systems has a drastic effect on the population of the gharials.The gharials were at one point close to extinction and their population was about 600. Breeding programs were started to save them. Thousands of gharials were released into the wild, but, unfortunately, they weren’t monitored so recently, when the gharial population was checked again, there were only 200 left and they were fast dying.

Scientists from all over were sent to India to help find out about and save the gharials from whatever it was that was harming them and causing them to die so rapidly.Tests were done, data was collected, but the reason for the drastic decrease of gharial population was unknown.

The industrialization happening on all sides was encroaching on the gharial’s habitat and threatening breeding patterns and was reducing the space that baby gharials needed to grow into healthy adult reptiles.The gharials have now become slightly more stable and are no longer in as critical danger as they once were.

While I was there, I realized that reptiles are by and large misunderstood.

Most people think snakes are really slimy and icky, but, on the contrary, they are really smooth, rubbery and satisfyingly wriggly when you hold them!!Another common thought is that crocs are absolutely dumb and have brains the size of peanuts and that they hardly move because they’re very stupid.They are actually very smart as I learnt from Soham’s behavioral enrichment!

They also don’t move a lot because they are conserving energy, kind of like the standby mode on laptops!!

This trip has taught me that, no matter what, we’re all part of the same planet; we all need the same air, same food, and (well, not the same food, but food nonetheless!!) a place to live and grow.

This trip has been truly enriching and an experience I won’t be able to forget even if I wanted to (not that I do, of course!).


To be a part of TGMP workshops, write to connect@gerrymartin.in