Salty Croc Encounter: Florida
Posted by: Loren Coleman on July 12th, 2009
Beachgoers said a scaly visitor was crawling through the tide Tuesday, July 7, 2009.
Residents said they spotted a crocodile on the beachside south of the Sebastian Inlet State Park in Indian River County, Florida. It’s one of a couple of sightings of crocodiles and alligators along Atlantic Ocean beaches in recent weeks, with a few spotted in Brevard County last month.
For more, see here.
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It’s just a piece of driftwood, but I can see how people would think this is a croc….
Actually, that’s an alligator that was photographed in the surf. The crocodile was also photographed and captured a short while later. It was later released back into the ocean. The croc and the gator (or gators) have been seen in the surf off the Brevard and Volusia coastlines in the past week or so.
Great post and great picture!!!
Maybe it was looking for extra snacks?
Hopefully the situation was taken care of.
Is this verified as a croc, as opposed to a pirce of driftwood? Wow, very scary. Would not want to run into one of these at the shore.
I agree cwh that profile is more alligator than crocodile. It certainly is not unknown for gators to enter saltwater but it is somewhat rare and they don’t habitually live in that environment the way crocs would because those lingual salt glands aren’t as highly developed as in crocs. Conversely it is not unknown but rare for crocs to be found away from the coastal areas of Florida. A colleague who was a National Park Ranger in the Everglades told me that that some years ago they were repairing a road culvert in the interior of the park and they found a nine foot American croc hiding in the culvert. They expected to maybe find a gator but not a croc.
Nice post! It does seem like a croc as opposed to a gator due to the more slender snout, but pics can be deceiving as we all know..
-Caj
This is just a few miles from my old stomping grounds in Vero Beach. I’ve fished in Sebastian Inlet and have been to the beaches around there. No encounters this interesting, though. I did see a manatee in the inlet once and wondered how it dealt with the extra bouyancy of salt water, but the aquatic blimp didn’t seem to have any problem. In Vero, in the late 70s, we had a 12-foot crocodile disturbed by construction workers not far from where I’d recently been standing in the shallows of the Indian River (which is a saltwater lagoon) cutting back mangroves for a landscaper. The croc was caught by wildlife officers and penned in a swimming ppol, but escaped. Subsequent searches for “Houdini,” as he was dubbed in the press, were fruitless.