There are somewhere between 24 and 27 living crocodilian species on the planet, depending on which recent split or reclassification you count. India has exactly three: the mugger, the saltwater crocodile, and the gharial. Three species out of a global two dozen might not sound like much, until you learn that only one place on the entire planet has all three living side by side. It is a single district in Odisha, and it also happens to have hosted one of the largest crocodiles ever recorded.
The district that has it all
Kendrapara, on Odisha's coast, is India's only district where mugger, saltwater crocodile and gharial all occur. Its centerpiece is Bhitarkanika National Park, a mangrove wilderness of tidal creeks and estuaries at the mouth of the Brahmani and Baitarani rivers. Bhitarkanika was set up in 1975 specifically to pull all three species back from the edge of extinction, and for salties at least, it worked spectacularly: the population there has gone from just 96 individuals in 1974 to more than 1,800 today, and Bhitarkanika alone now holds around 70 to 75 percent of India's entire saltwater crocodile population.
The gharial part of the story is far more fragile, and worth being honest about. Gharials are not an established breeding population in Kendrapara the way saltwater crocodiles are. Kendrapara's "all three" status was only confirmed in August 2021, when a baby gharial was spotted in the Paika river, the first live gharial seen in the district's waters, years after only a nine-foot carcass had turned up in 2018. It is a real and exciting sign that gharials are finding their way into the district's river systems, most likely wanderers from conservation populations upstream, but it is a toehold, not yet a foothold.
Meet the three
The saltwater crocodile: the largest reptile alive
Crocodylus porosus is not just India's biggest reptile, it is the biggest reptile on the planet, full stop. Males regularly reach 6 metres (about 20 feet) and can weigh over a tonne. In India its three strongholds are Bhitarkanika, the Sundarbans, and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, everywhere the coast turns into mangrove and tidal creek.
The mugger: the one that uses tools
The mugger, or marsh crocodile, is the generalist of the three, at home in rivers, lakes, reservoirs and even village ponds across 15 Indian states. It rarely tops 4 to 5 metres, modest by saltwater-crocodile standards, but it makes up for size with brains. In 2013, biologist Vladimir Dinets documented mugger crocodiles in India balancing small sticks and twigs across their snouts and lying motionless near nesting colonies of herons and egrets. Birds hunting for nest material would swoop down to grab the stick, and get grabbed instead. It was the first ever confirmed case of tool use in any reptile.
The gharial: built for fish, not for fighting
If the mugger is the brains of the group, the gharial is the specialist. Its long, impossibly thin snout is lined with around 110 interlocking teeth built for one job: snatching fish sideways in a single fast strike. It cannot do much else with that snout, which is exactly why gharials are almost never involved in attacks on people, despite being among the largest crocodilians in the world.
Mature males grow an even stranger feature: a hollow, bulbous growth at the tip of the snout called a ghara, the Hindi word for an earthen pot, which it resembles. It works as a resonating chamber, letting males produce a buzzing hiss that can carry up to 75 metres underwater to attract females. It is also the most endangered of the three by far: Critically Endangered since 2007, with a global population estimated at under 900 individuals.
The legend of Kalia, and what his skull actually says
Bhitarkanika's most famous resident was not a conservation success story. For roughly 50 years, a huge, dark-skinned saltwater crocodile known as Kalia, "the dark one," was blamed for terrorising a stretch of the Dhamra river, said to have killed somewhere between 13 and 20 people. In 1926 he was finally shot, and villagers found bangles belonging to his victims inside him.
When naturalist Romulus Whitaker and colleagues properly re-measured the preserved skull in the 2000s, the snout-to-skull length came out to 73.3 cm, which by standard crocodile proportions works out to a body length closer to 17.5 feet, still an enormous crocodile, just not quite the legend.
The gap between "23 feet" as local legend and "17.5 feet" as measured skull is a nice reminder of how folklore rounds enormous animals up, and how useful an actual tape measure is.
A rare good-news story
Strip away the legends and the exaggerated feet, and what is left in Odisha is a genuine conservation success. Fifty years ago, all three of India's crocodilians were sliding toward extinction. Targeted breeding and protection programs starting in the 1970s pulled all three back from the brink. Kendrapara having all three today, however fragile the gharial's toehold still is, is proof that it worked. That is arguably a better headline than any 24-foot man-eater.
