When it comes to crocodiles, everyone knows that this reptile is huge and cold-blooded and ruthless, especially when hunting, it can easily tear its prey apart, but the mainland Chinese alligator also has strong times, such as: "death gaze"!
Blogger @crocodile is hungry posted a video on October 17 with the caption: "Big eyes, little black teeth! A big dinosaur with a fierce heart"! Here's a GIF made of a video, let's see how tough this crocodile is.
In the video, this man is the keeper of the alligator, and when he was feeding the alligator, he was stared at by the alligator to death! However, the man did not flinch and kept making eye contact with the crocodile.
This crocodile has small eyes open, black teeth exposed, and a slightly open mouth, as if to say: "I am a crocodile, what do you see"? At this time, the man no longer fed the alligator, but picked up his mobile phone to take pictures, and even pasted the mobile phone on the face of the alligator.
And this Chinese alligator was probably shy, and immediately retracted into the water, "I don't look at it, I walked, walked." Haha, after seeing this video, I was amused by the behavior of the Chinese alligator, and at the same time I couldn't help but wonder, why didn't the Chinese alligator die out when it was so weak?
The Chinese alligator is a family of dragons, a genus of dragons, known as a dragon in ancient times, and is commonly known as "earth dragon" or "pig dragon", which is a small crocodile unique to the mainland. It is 1.5-1.8 meters long and inhabits the remaining wetlands along the river and ponds in hilly valleys.
Chinese alligators hibernate in late November and begin to hibernate around late April of the following year, when the average temperature reaches 16°C or more. It has a well-developed sense of smell, sight and hearing, and feeds mainly on fish, shrimp, snails, mussels and frogs.
As we all know, the Chinese alligator has a slow movement speed, a relatively poor bite force, and a relatively low predation success rate, so this crocodile is not extinct when so many creatures on the continent are extinct? I think the reason may be the following 4 points.
1. Historically, the Chinese alligator has been widely distributed in the Yellow River, Huai River, Yangtze River and Qiantang River basins in the eastern part of the mainland. With human activities and climate change, it has gradually shrunk into the lower reaches of the Yangtze River.
The wild population is almost entirely distributed in the Yangtze Alligator National Reserve, which consists of five counties in southern Anhui Province, and is divided into about 20 isolated small populations. If any kind of creature wants to not become extinct for a long time, it must first be widely distributed, and the Chinese alligator has done it, although it was once endangered, but with protection, this creature still survived.
Second, the harm is relatively small, and there are many cases of crocodile cannibalism recorded in the history of the mainland, and the government even summons officials and strong men to form a large-scale crocodile hunting team to hunt crocodiles. In the Ming Dynasty, in order to eliminate the crocodile problem, the famous minister Xia Yuanji gathered 500 fishing boats, each carrying mineral ash, and used the drum as an order to scatter the mineral ash into the water and poison the crocodile. When twilight falls, "crocodiles die on the seashore".
Until the end of the Qing Dynasty, there were bay crocodiles on the coast of China. In 1907, Li Zhun, the commander of the Guangdong Navy Division, patrolled the South China Sea on a warship and accidentally killed a bay crocodile in the Xisha Islands. After that, there was no trace of wild bay crocodiles on the mainland. Xia Yuan and Li Zhun hunted crocodiles, which were large and often cannibals, so they were caught cleanly.
In this case, whether official or non-governmental, almost no one has captured the alligator on a large scale, and its own weakness has also allowed the alligator to escape.
Third, it is not suitable to be captured, the Chinese alligator is very weak in our eyes, but it is not without a way to escape capture, that is, the cave! In the wild, Chinese alligators have little guts and will flee into burrows to hide when the wind blows.
The burrows of the alligator are complex, with openings on the ground and at the bottom of the water, and there are even multiple stomasites on the ground, and the widespread use of these burrows and their very stealthy behavior allow the alligator to inhabit wetland habitats in densely populated areas.
In 1979, the villagers of Yinjiabian, Si'an Town, Changxing County, spontaneously sent 11 Chinese alligators into the "Shangbamu" pond, and protected them in situ with bamboo fences, and established the Yinjiabian Village-level Yangtze Alligator Conservation Area. After decades of development, village-level reserves have been upgraded to provincial-level reserves, and the population of Chinese alligators has increased from 11 to more than 9,000.
In other words, the alligator has been protected since 1979! If the white sturgeon, Chinese sturgeon, Yangtze sturgeon, mandarin fish, anchovy, etc., these fish have been protected since 1979, and this will not be the case today, don't you say?
And finally: the man feeds the crocodile and is stared at by death! Big eyes, small black teeth, I'm a crocodile, what do you see? This is the rare domineering of the Chinese alligator, but it was glared back again!
The reason why the Chinese alligator is so weak and did not die out is mainly because it is widely distributed, the harm is relatively weak, it is not easy to capture, and the protection is relatively early, so that they are too extinct to the fate of extinction, what do you say?