The aboriginal people of Australia have a special place for the saltwater crocodile in their culture, and legends tell the story of the first humans being born from a crocodile. Some populations believe the souls of their ancestors reside in the large salties living in nearby rivers, and refuse to kill the older, venerable adults. For others, however, salties make good eating, and aboriginals have been hunting them for thousands of years with no overall detrimental effect on the population. Early European settlers witnessing the splendor of Australia's waterways for the first time used words such as "teeming" and "infested" to describe the numbers of crocodiles they saw. They soon discovered the soft belly skin of the crocodile to be far more valuable than its meat. Between 1945 and the late 1960s, salties were hunted so intensively for their scaly coats that populations throughout northern Australia were pushed to dangerously low levels. Few people cared, however, and it was up to the hunters themselves to draw attention to the plight of the remaining crocodiles. Protection was finally granted in 1971 in the Northern Territory when fewer than 3,000 crocs were estimated to remain out of a former population of close to 100,000. Were the dragons finally to be slain?

The crocodilian evolutionary lineage has not survived since before the age of dinosaurs to be defeated so easily. Once protection had been granted, a monitoring program was initiated to chart the gradual recovery of salties in the Northern Territory. Early interpretation of the data was confusing, perhaps because most people expected the population to recover so slowly, if at all. In reality, salties were bouncing back with a vengeance. By the early 1980s, the population was estimated to be at least 30,000 individuals, and now in 1999 our best guess shows the population to be approaching 80,000. Research during this period has unraveled some of the dynamics behind such a staggering recovery, but it is only now that we are truly starting to understand the incredible ability of these creatures to adapt to changing population pressures. Some of this work has been essential in engineering a radical conservation strategy, which has proven invaluable to the long-term health of saltwater crocodile populations in the wild. Radical means controversial, right? You bet!