This river ain’t big enough for the two of us…
Sure, alligators are big and tough and scary, but crocodiles? They’re a whole different level of terrifying.
They’re larger and stronger than gators, not to mention much more aggressive and territorial. While we’ve got a growing population of American crocodiles in Florida, no country has more than Australia.
Estimates for total crocodile population in the Land Down Under hover in the 150,000 range, according to Australia Geographic, but don’t let the low number compared to the US alligator population deceive you, there’s few places safe from these dinosaurs in the Outback.
Need an example? Let’s look at this video captured by the self-proclaimed “Matthew McConaughey of Australia”.
Damian “Wildman” Duffy is a former paratrooper turned wildlife expert and now takes people on tours of the Australian wilderness. He just recently witnessed a rare sight that even he can be heard saying he’d never seen before.
Two enormous crocodiles, each around 15 feet long and over 1,000 pounds, went to all out war in the middle of a river.
Most likely they were fighting over territory, because let’s be honest neither one wants to compete with the other for resources, so they squared up and settled their differences like gentlemen to, but thrashing each other around.
The commentary heard in the video goes miles in explaining just how rare this is:
“You need to get outta there, buddy. Stumpy’s got him. Stumpy’s got him. They’re rolling each other. Bloody hell. Haven’t seen this for awhile, mate. Mate, no I haven’t see this for awhile… Bloody hell this is insane. This is insane! Mate, we’ve never seen anything like this. We’ve never seen anything like this.”
Listening to an excited Australian narrate a crocodile fight between “Stumpy” and “Wokeye” is pure gold…
It’s hard to keep up with the action but Duffy knew both of these crocs well and provided the below description of the event in his video caption.
“Big Croc Fight! This ain’t your hood, bro..
2 of the big boys went at it today, Wokeye cruised right into Stumpy’s territory and it was go time.. both crocs are close to 5m long and weigh around half a tonne!
Usually Saltwater Crocodiles will try to intimidate each other first, but that didn’t happen today and they went right to it without hesitation. I feel like Wokeye won this one, but Stumpy escorted him half a kilometre back down the river against the tide.
What an absolutely incredible thing to witness.”
My goodness, the power that each of these guy’s showed is truly outrageous. One straight up lifted the other out of the water and began rolling him, just an insanely impressive thing that we should be fortunate we can watch from the comfort of our phone screens.
Australia really is a cruel and beautiful beast of a landscape.
