Queensland Beach Rangers Manage Crocodiles With Traps and GPS Technology

Australia is known for deadly wildlife. Just about everything is poisonous there, and they also get to share some of their beaches with crocodiles. Crocs are incredibly shrewd predators and splashing around in water shared with crocodiles is a recipe for disaster. Urban sprawl in North Queensland is encroaching further into crocodile habitat. Wildlife rangers have been enlisted to monitor the beaches, noting any sighting by recording the approximate size and GPS location of the crocodiles, and removing the dangerous predators from populated areas.

“The Queensland Government has responded with a new management plan that carves large areas between Townsville and Cairns into three zones,” Matt Wordsworth reports. “Zone One is a complete exclusion area where preventative barriers are constructed. Zone Two areas require crocs over two meters in length to be trapped, except in metropolitan Cairns, where all crocs are removed. In Zone Three, animals are only taken if aggressive. All are offered free of charge to croc farms for breeding purposes.”

“What this is going to do is lead people into a false sense of security and that they will feel that it’s an exclusion zone or it’s proactive removal zone, there’s no crocodiles around. it’s OK to wade into the water, go for a swim and put themselves at threat. My feeling is that this is just a disaster waiting to happen,” explained Professor Craig Franklin from the Biological Science department at the University of Queensland. Franklin recently returned from a GPS tracking study of crocodiles in North Queensland. “A crocodile can travel 60 kilometers in a day. It can move along the coastline from river system to river system and it can walk across land.”

“The government needs to listen to what we know about these animals and to focus more of their effort on education than spending I think will be an exorbitant amount of money catching every crocodile, including little hatchlings, from these proactive removal zones,” Professor Franklin added.

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Queensland Beach Rangers Manage Crocodiles With Traps and GPS Technology