Animal Diaries Archive

Trading Places

31 March 2008

Welcome back to another installment of life in the crocodile world. In this episode we touch on the change of enclosures for two of our Crocoseum crocodiles, Norman and Mossman. Mossman is a 13ft, 450kg salt water crocodile and is the largest of the crocodiles we use in our Crocoseum demonstrations. Normy is a little pocket rocket full of aggression and comes in at 11ft and 250kgs.

Recently these two amazing crocs have swapped enclosures out the back of the Crocoseum. This was just for safety when maintaining the croc ponds at the back of the Crocoseum. Norman had been residing in the middle pond of our 7 Crocoseum enclosures, while Mossman had his little pad on the far end. Lucky Norman had the considerably larger enclosure even though he was the smaller crocodile so we decided to give Mossman the upgrade. Now obviously we can’t just open the gates and they’ll just swap easy as you like with no hassles. These male crocodiles would fight to the death for dominance. So it was a matter of leading Mossman out into the Crocoseum main arena and closing as many gates behind us as we could to ensure there was no interaction between the two crocodiles. Then we led Norman down the canal into his new enclosure and once he was locked down we led Mossman back into his new home as well.

The whole operation went very smoothly and both crocodiles seemed to except the change very well. Norman is as crazy as ever and Mossman seems very content with his new larger home. So check the guys out at the Crocoseum next time your in and always remember……crocs rule!