Perth Zoo’s half-tonne Estuarine Crocodile spends most of his time doing what crocs do best – conserving energy.
Perth Zoo’s half-tonne Estuarine Crocodile spends most of his time doing what crocs do best – conserving energy.
He may look like a sunken log in a waterhole, but ‘Dangalabba’ is as real as they come. We promise! Despite what you see on TV, crocodiles only eat once a month through winter, with their appetite picking up as the weather gets warmer.
Between times, their survival depends on them conserving energy until they really need it, so they sink to the bottom of a waterhole or doze on its shores and wait for something delicious to come to the water’s edge.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to Perth Zoo my name's Matt, I'm one of the croc keepers. This is Dangalabba or as we like to call him Danga. He's our big saltwater crocodile and he arrived recently at Perth Zoo in October 2019. He came to us from Broome. He was at Malcolm Douglas Crocodile Farm and then he headed down here to live his life at the Zoo. Saltwater crocodiles are solitary most of the time, so he actually quite enjoys himself in this big exhibit that he's got behind us here.
They don't like company, crocodiles tend to defend themselves a nice big territory. They will have females in that territory that they will visit from time to time, but they generally like that solitary actually quite happy to be here at the zoo, doing some nice territorial displays and then settle himself into a nice pattern of basking during the day as you can see him doing right now swimming around in his pool when he needs to and spending a bit of time out of the water at night as well.
Crocodiles tend to regulate their temperature by getting in and out of the water as required, and we'll find that he readjusts himself to Perth temperature quite quickly. As we go into winter he'll spend more time in the pool where it's a toasty 26 degrees. Since arriving at the Zoo, Dangalabba has been starting to increase his feeds. So we give him a nice variety of different foo. He gets things like fish, chicken, a bit of meat as well and he's actually started to adapt to those food types.
So we manage the crocodile by moving him into his holding area which is at the back of the exhibit. He's actually really quickly picked up on moving through into his holding area, he gets a small reward, we can lock him back there where it's safe for us to go into the exhibit to do lots of different work that we need to do without the crocodile present. Then bring him back on display when we finish that work. So Dangalabba weighs around about 400 kilos and he's around about 4.2 meters long. So he's quite a big boy but he's got more growing to go. We'll expect him to live up to 70, he's about 30 to 35 years old now. He'll continue growing as some saltwater crocodiles have been measured at over five meters and they can weigh up to a thousand kilograms.