Diet: Their staple diet is fish, but they will scavenge carrion and as ambush predators will attack anything unfortunate enough to cross their path, including wildebeest crossing the Mara river during their ‘great migration’. Adults can survive a year without eating.
Incubation: 90 days, laying 25–80 eggs over a 2-month period.
Weight: About 11 inches long, weighing about 70 grams, on hatching, reaching 2–5 metres and weighing anything from 220 and 700 kg as adults.
Growth: Hatchlings grow to about 1.2 metres by 2 years, when they naturally leave the nest. By 4 years they are about 2 metres long and at this size they are much less susceptible to predation or cannibalization. They reach sexual maturity at 12–16 years, depending on their health, size and weight, and will continue to grow through their life.
Body temperature: Like all reptiles, crocodiles are ‘poikilothermic’. Their ideal temperature range for basking, allowing optimum performance in the water, is between 18.8 and 29.2 °C.
Interesting fact: The Nile crocodile has temperature-dependent sex determination: if the average temperature during the middle third of their incubation period falls outside the range 31.7–34.5 °C, their offspring will be female, if within, male.
Conservation: In 1971 all 23 species of crocodilians were considered ‘endangered’ or ‘threatened’, leading to the foundation of the Crocodile Specialist Group (CSG). Crocodile numbers have since undergone the most dramatic improvement in conservation status of any group of vertebrates, with 7 species remaining endangered, 8 no longer considered endangered, and the remainder sufficiently abundant to support well-regulated annual egg harvests. The key to this success is the cooperation of companies involved in every facet of the international reptile skin and leather trade. Today the crocodilian skin industry views conservation as an investment in the future, with many companies contributing to conservation projects and actively curtailing illegal trade. While the work of the CSG has been extraordinary, they continue to strive to bring all crocodile species off the endangered list. See: www.iucncsg.org.
17
KANGAROO
‘I have no fear of losing my life – if I have to save a koala or a crocodile or a kangaroo or a snake, mate, I will save it.’
Steve Irwin
It had been one of those nights on call when sleep had eluded me, not due to insomnia, but a flurry of calls. It had started just as I was sitting down to a TV dinner at about 9 p.m. A limping cat was apparently loose in the local Tesco store, and no one could catch it. Two hours later, the hunt that had taken me down several food aisles and out into the storeroom, now culminated in a stand-off under a Portakabin behind the back of the store. By this time the cat was far too stressed, agitated and scared to let me catch her without a fight. I attempted to crawl underneath the building to retrieve her while trying to avoid the hisses and swipes being aimed in my general direction, but failed miserably. I concluded that setting a trap would be our best hope. Once caught, her sore leg could be assessed and treated, before hopefully being reunited with her owner.
Then there had been Mrs Jones, who phoned at 2 a.m. about her itchy dog. Dermatologists happily admit that one of the reasons they choose that speciality is because skin problems are rarely an emergency, so you can understand my sense-of-humour failure on losing precious sleep to see a dog with fleas. Despite my gentle, drowsy attempts to persuade the owner that it could wait till the morning, she remained unconvinced and insisted I saw Bessie, her little West Highland White Terrier, in person. So I dutifully dragged myself out of bed on a cold November night to administer the most expensive flea treatment in history. Then, at 6 a.m. that morning, I received one of the most bizarre phone calls of my career.
‘Hello, is that the vet’s?’ said the voice on the other end of the phone as I fumbled for my bedside light.
‘Yes, this is Jon, the vet on call, how can I help you?’ I said, trying not to sound as sleepy and bleary-eyed as I felt.
‘Ah, good, thanks … Well, sir, it’s my pufferfish, you see, he’s floating around the top of his tank all … well, puffed up, but not like normal, like. He’s on his side and I don’t know what’s wrong with him, but he’s definitely not right.’
‘Sorry, did you say your pufferfish isn’t very well?’ I asked.
‘Yes, my pufferfish. He’s in a really bad way, I think he might be on the way out. Can you take a look at him?’
Believe me, trying to sound intelligent, logical, knowledgeable at the same time as offering sane, wise advice at 6 a.m., when you’ve just been abruptly woken from a deep sleep is hard at the best of times, but when the subject matter involves one of the 8.7 million species that had bypassed our veterinary curriculum, I failed pretty miserably.
‘Do you want a visit or will you bring him into the surgery?’ I asked.
‘Um … he’s in a 6-foot tank, so I think you’d best come out to the house,’ he replied, his tone reflecting the stupidity of my question.
‘Ah, yes, of course,’ I replied rather sheepishly. ‘And whereabouts are you?’
‘At home,’ he said.
This was not going well.
‘Sorry, I mean where do you live?’
‘Oh, I see, West Brom, near the footie ground. Do you want the postcode?’
‘That’s great, thanks,’ I said, noting it down. ‘So did you just find him like this today?’
‘Yeah, he’s been fine. I mean, he puffs up when things startle him, but that’s usual for ’em, but he’s been doing it a lot more recently. I’m not sure he can control it like he used to – either that or he’s just getting a bit jumpy in his old age. I’ve had him six years, so he’s getting on for a puffer. Real character he is, though, I’ll be sad to see him go, but I gotta do what’s best for him, ain’t I. I’m on earlies this week so went to feed them as usual when I woke up, and there he was, all puffed up and on his side, real sad to see.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that. You got quite a few, then?’
‘Oh yes, love ’em, such characters … Anyway, you gonna come out and see him or what? I mean, I doubt there’s much that can be done, but I can’t see him suffer, you know what I mean?’
‘I’ll be with you in about half an hour.’
I lay in bed for a moment processing the call. Was I really just about to go and see a pufferfish, somewhere near West Bromwich Albion’s home ground? Even as I thought about it, it sounded completely absurd. But my client was genuinely concerned, so I dragged myself out of bed, dressed and set off.
Unfortunately, the pufferfish had indeed been beyond veterinary intervention, and so with the help of a bottle of euthanasia liquid, I had humanely decreased the global pufferfish population by one. Heading straight back to the practice, I made it by just after 8.30 a.m., feeling fairly awake and chipper, despite my sleep deprivation, though with the prospect of a whole day’s consulting in front of me, I knew I would fade fast. It was going to have to be a multiple coffee and tea day.
I managed the first two hours without too much problem – the usual routines, with a couple of patients that needed admitting for some further investigation, blood tests, or to go on fluids, that sort of thing – but I was starting to flag, so welcomed the cup of tea that Lucy brought me at eleven in between patients. Taking a brief moment’s respite to savour it, I scanned through the rest of the appointments on my morning list. The gap that had existed at 11.50 a.m. was now occupied by our client, Rich, from the local zoo. He was bringing in an eleven-month-old grey kangaroo joey called Kevin that had a snotty nasal discharge and runny eyes. A kangaroo with a cold: this was rapidly becoming one of the odder twenty-four hours of my career.