American Crocodile Conservation

Something that really excites me is, success stories of conservation. Recently I stumbled upon a story about how in a nuclear plant in south Florida there is a very large and thriving population of American Crocodiles (Crocodylus acutus). This is very important because south Florida is the only place you can see both an American Crocodile and an American Alligator cohabitating. This interest leads me to doing some of my own research on the American Crocodile.  I found the research attached to the power plant that first peaked my interest. It is the Turkey Point power plant in Miami. In this article by Venetia Briggs‐Gonzalez, Christophe Bonenfant, Mathieu Basille, Michael Cherkiss, Jeff Beauchamp and Frank Mazzotti they use multiple techniques to study the size, sex and age of each crocodile. They do so by doing a catch, tag and release procedure, which is very common in conservation and population monitoring. Tey found that over the past 30 years that the population of American Crocodiles has steadily increased at an average of four percent each year. The author also talks about the reason why this population is thriving and how it is seen as an success story of how humans can disturb an environment and not harm local species. The power plant gives off a lot of heat causing the water temperature to be high through out the year. It also has very disturbed sandy banks that are perfect for nest making. I believe that conservation like this is very important because the likelihood of people not disrupting environment to create homes is very small, but I do believe that there is a way that we can teach people to build correctly and allow local wild life to thrive within human communities.

https://besjournals-onlinelibrary-wiley-com.nuncio.cofc.edu/doi/full/10.1111/1365-2656.12723