MIAMI – American crocodiles, once reduced to a few hundred reclusive reptiles hidden among the mangroves of the deep Everglades, are crawling off the endangered species list.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Tuesday said crocodiles in South Florida – the only place they live in the United States – have rebounded so impressively that they no longer face imminent risk of extinction. The crocs will be officially reclassified as “threatened” next month.

“It’s really a great thing,” said Cindy Schulz, endangered species supervisor for the service’s Vero Beach field office. “It means the crocodile is doing much better.”

Crocodiles, skittish salt-water reptiles often mistaken for the lurking alligators so common in backyard canals, remain rare at an estimated 1,400 to 2,000 animals – not including hundreds of hatchlings gulped by adults after every breeding season.

But the population has multiplied five- to ten-fold since the crocodile was placed on the federal endangered species list in 1975, when most of the 200 to 300 crocs were living along northeast Florida Bay in Everglades National Park.

The crocs’ recovery is dwarfed by Florida’s explosion of alligators, which at an estimated 1 million-plus have become so numerous that state wildlife managers are considering removing protections and expanding hunting seasons.

But like their gator cousins, crocs, most easily distinguished by their narrower, snaggle-toothed snouts, have expanded their range, showing up in a number of new places over the last decade – popping up in parks and fairways along Biscayne Bay, surfing onto beaches near Jupiter and plopping eggs in a Sanibel garden.

“Everywhere there is some protected land along the coast, you’re going to find a croc there,” said a private wildlife biologist, Joe Wasilewski, who has spent 20 years surveying crocodiles in one of the havens where they’ve flourished – the maze of cooling canals around Florida Power & Light’s Turkey Point nuclear plant on Biscayne Bay.

Wildlife managers and croc researchers say the most critical key to the status change is that some 95 percent of prime breeding grounds are already owned by federal, state or county agencies or permanently preserved – the canals and protected wetland at the power plant in South Miami-Dade County, the coastal fringe of Everglades National Park all the way to Cape Sable on the southwest coast and the Crocodile Lake National Wildlife Refuge in North Key Largo.

“The nesting areas that we know about, except for a few individual nests, are already protected,” Schulz said.

Federal wildlife managers say the reptiles still face threats, including degradation of coastal habitat.

and increased encounters with people, though the animal instinctually shies from humans. The crocodile also will remain listed as an endangered species across the rest of its range from the Caribbean to South America.


Schulz said federal biologists expect the croc count to continue to grow. But Wasilewski, who has watched Turkey Point’s population rise from 19 in 1985 to about 400 in 2005, says scientists can’t say if there is room for many more.

Wasilewski has been tracking smaller crocs with microchips and he frequently recovers those tracers in the stomachs of larger ones.

“I just found one with six,” he said. “We don’t know the carrying capacity, but I can tell you this, they’ve controlled their own population.”


Some environmentalists had opposed the down-listing when it was first proposed in 2002, fearing the reclassification could cut into critical funding and water down development restrictions.

Laurie MacDonald, Florida director of the Defenders of Wildlife, said her group had just received the croc notice and she couldn’t comment on specifics. But she said she hoped the service was taking a cautious approach.

“What we’ll be looking for is whether or not the analysis shows the down-listing is not based on just one area and that the population is robust enough to withstand the kinds of pressures that continue,” she said.

Though the down-listing could theoretically lessen crocodile concerns for some coastal development, Schulz said that practically speaking, it will mean little change in terms of protecting and monitoring crocodiles. Even when crocs were listed as endangered, the service hasn’t previously blocked any projects.


Wasilewski, who also originally opposed the move, now supports it – in part because of pledges from wildlife managers that protections that brought crocs back will remain.

“That’s what I’ve been concerned about,” he said, “that it will not allow developers to just have a green light to go in and develop this entire coastal region,” he said. “I’ve been given assurance that won’t happen.”

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(c) 2007, The Miami Herald.

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AP-NY-03-20-07 2023EDT