This peculiar species of crocodilian was once abundant in the great rivers of India.
Today, less than 300 adults are left in the wild struggling to prevent the extinction of the species.
They are called Garials, and until the turn of the century, they were plentiful in the sacred river Ganges.
They take their Latin name from that river, Garial gangeticus, the Ganges Garial.
As a result of hunting by man, the Garial has now disappeared from the river Ganges,
and this story is set in three other rivers in India.
The long-snouted Garial has lived in the deeper pools of these fertile rivers for many millions of years.
The Garial is the only living member of the family Gavialdi.
The other members of the family are now extinct.
They grow to massive proportions and reach a length of seven to eight metres, nearly 23 feet or more.
In contrast to many other crocodilians, Garials are very shy,
and in spite of their massive body size and ferocious appearance, they are harmless to man.
The male Garial grows a strange hump at the tip of its snout at maturity,
and it is from this that the animal takes its name.
The hump is thought to resemble a pitcher, which is called Garar in Hindi.
The male Garial is the only crocodilian to have this hump.
The female does not have it.
Its exact function has puzzled the scientific world until recently,
and indeed many parts of the Garial's natural history were unknown until this film was made.
Unlike other crocodilians, which feed on a great range of prey, including mammals,
the Garial feeds exclusively on fish.
Its body is streamlined and provides the propulsion.
The legs are relatively small and used for stabilisation.
The peculiar jaws look strangely thin when compared with the solid muscular body,
but a thin snout moves through the water with less resistance
so that the Garial can catch even the fastest moving fish.
To swallow their catch, they always return to the surface.
The jaws of the Garial have 108 sharp teeth,
which are perfectly adapted for catching and manipulating fish.
The catch is tossed into position before it's swallowed.
This sometimes takes several minutes.
If Garials catch fish larger than they can swallow,
they break them into smaller pieces, thrashing their heads from side to side above the water.
Smaller fish go down in one head first.
That way the fins and scales don't snag the gullet.
Ever since the fish-eating Garials evolved about 100 million years ago,
they have lived in the rivers of the Indian subcontinent.
At the turn of the century, they were numerous in the Ganges
and the Brahmaputra River systems in India and Nepal,
the Mohannadi of central India, the Indus of Pakistan,
the Padma of Bangladesh, and perhaps the Rawadi of Burma.
The last few Garials alive today are found in several protected sanctuaries
like Kovit National Park.
It is India's oldest nature reserve and lies in the foothills of the Himalayas.
The Ramganga River runs gurgling through the park.
It's snow-fed waters chillingly cold throughout the year.
Like all reptiles, Garials depend on external heat to raise their body temperatures,
and basking in the sun is an important activity.
They spend a long time checking to see that it is safe before leaving the water.
Taking their cue from the first Garial to emerge,
the others head for their favourite basking sites.
In winter, they may spend the whole day basking if left undisturbed.
In summer, just a few hours is enough for them to warm up.
Garials are the most aquatic of the crocodilians.
Because their front legs are poorly developed,
this puts them at a great disadvantage on land,
and they never venture far from the water's edge
so that they can return quickly to safety if necessary.
The old males are the last to come out of the water.
They're extremely wary and are very seldom seen basking.
It is not known how long Garials live, but this one is at least 25
and might live as long as 100.
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To find out how good new Kellogg's Complete Oven-Baked Muesli is,
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I want to make one thing perfectly clear.
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In most recent times,
large male gharials were the target of big game and trophy hunters.
A prince of the state of Orissa is said to have shot a hundred gharials
in a single day just for target practice.
But it was the increasing demand later on for its skin for leather goods,
handbags and shoes in the West, that nearly finished the gharial.
By 1972, the population in the wild was less than 100.
The gharial was on the brink of extinction.
It was only then that the Government of India stepped in
and banned all gharial hunting and all trade in its skin.
Recently, six more sanctuaries were created for the last few animals,
but they're not always as safe as they might be.
The Orissa gorge is a very safe place to fish.
Satkosheer Gorge Sanctuary on the Mahanadi River in the state of Orissa.
To protect the gharials,
the use of these large nets has been banned in the sanctuary.
In the past, many gharials have become entangled and died in them.
But the fishermen still use the nets illegally,
and the wildlife protection guards wage an unceasing battle against these men.
They confiscate the nets and find the offenders,
but the whole thing is very difficult to police.
In addition to the problems with fishermen,
transportation of bamboo down the Satkosheer Gorge also threatens the gharial.
The cheapest method for getting the bamboo to the paper mills is to raft it downstream,
but this disturbs the shy gharials.
Bamboo rafts are very difficult to transport.
Bamboo rafting may prevent them from basking, for example.
The struggle of man versus gharial goes on even in the protected regions.
To the northwest of Satkosheer Gorge in central India is the most important gharial refuge of all,
the National Chambal River Sanctuary.
There are 530 kilometres of river with a breeding population of about 60 gharials.
Not very large by any standards, but it's the largest in India and indeed in the world.
Breeding begins at the end of winter.
The dominant males form harems of three or four females.
There are so few gharials that in their eagerness to mate,
the females may sometimes approach other females by mistake.
The male advertises its presence loudly.
The male emits a combination of whistles and hisses that are amplified by its nasal hump.
It's a noise that can be compared only with the sound produced by a steam locomotive.
The male emits a combination of whistles and hisses that are amplified by its nasal hump.
It's a noise that can be compared only with the sound produced by a steam locomotive.
A responsive female approaches the male, raises her snout beside him and replies with softer calls.
Bubbling of air by both further confirms their acceptance of each other.
Alternately surfacing and submerging, the partners now swim side by side towards shallow water.
When the female is touching the river bed, the male can mount her.
He must be very careful to make the female sit on the river bed.
When the female is touching the river bed, the male can mount her.
He must be very careful to make the right moves now,
for if he makes a mistake in courtship or mounting,
then the female will desert him immediately, even right at the last moment.
The male is unsuccessful, and seeing another female approaching,
he encourages her to clap his jaws.
These jaw clouts are clearly audible above the surface, even though they're made under water.
After several attempts, the male gets a secure hold on the female.
The love-locked pair will then go down into deep water to mate.
When mating is over, the female moves away, and the male may well try the next member of the harem.
A month after mating, the females increasingly climb out onto the river banks to find a suitable nesting site.
This is when they make their longest journeys on land, wandering as far as ten metres from the water.
No one has ever filmed a female gharial prospecting for a nest site before, let alone laying her eggs.
It took filmmaker Naresh Bedi and his team three years to film this event.
The first two years they missed it all together,
and the third year there were days of endless waiting for the full nesting story.
One day at dusk, a female crawled up the bank towards them.
It seemed that she was ready to lay her eggs.
But suddenly a storm began to blow up.
The female started digging her nest with her hind legs in the torrential rain.
But filming came to an abrupt halt.
The camera lights out on the river bank had temporarily failed in the downpour.
A scorpion crawled into the hide to shelter from the storm, but nothing would deter the camera team now.
A tape recording of croaking frogs was switched on to cover any accidental sound that might scare the nesting female back to water.
The camera lights were restored, and then out in the darkness the female was finishing her digging.
A gharial looks at its most prehistoric out of the water.
It has taken her three hours to excavate her nest.
Then she begins to lay her eggs, each at intervals of a minute and a half.
She keeps her legs inside the nest to prevent the eggs falling too heavily on the ones already laid.
Egg laying is a tiring process.
After 45 minutes she's exhausted and almost unable to force her 23rd and last egg out.
But she soon begins the laborious process of filling the nest in again to cover the eggs.
It was almost 300 million years ago that the reptiles developed an egg with a shell that could incubate out of water.
This enabled them to conquer the land, and they then dominated it for 200 million years.
The crocodilians are an aquatic leftover from the time when reptiles ruled the world, the age of the dinosaurs.
In fact, the gharial's whole nesting process is somehow highly reminiscent of that ancient era.
The female gharial uses the weight of her body to compact the sand covering the eggs.
This trampling motion is perhaps the same instinctive movement that the dinosaurs used to bury their eggs.
To conceal all traces of the nest, she moves to several positions and throws on more sand.
It has taken her a full 10 hours to complete nesting, and the female's task is by no means over.
During the next few weeks she will keep an increasingly anxious watch on her eggs to protect them from the danger of predation.
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There's an old wives' tale that says sugar is high in calories.
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So in moderation, in a balanced diet, it hardly makes any difference.
Sugar, you're a natural part of life.
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Since 1974, the Government of India has joined forces with international organisations
to conserve the nearly extinct gharial.
In a joint project, gharial eggs are collected for hatching in captivity.
Many of these employed for the project are local boatmen,
people who in the past have probably killed hundreds of gharials and eaten many of their eggs.
The government has also been involved in the process of collecting and storing the gharial eggs.
Today, they've changed sides and are helping the conservationists.
The nest cavity can be located by probing into the sand with a blunt steel rod.
The team were fortunate this year and found three nests at this site.
Many facts are still being uncovered about gharial breeding habits.
For example, a female gharial buries her eggs a foot below the surface.
This is for a very good reason. Even when the surface of the sand becomes scorchingly hot,
the eggs buried below remain at a uniform temperature of 30 to 35 degrees centigrade.
The eggs are carefully marked. It's vital that the red spot is uppermost during transportation.
If reptile eggs are rolled during incubation, the membranes inside are damaged
and the embryos become deformed.
There can be up to a hundred eggs in each nest depending on the age and size of the female.
The eggs weigh about 180 grams and are three times the size of a hen's egg.
Nesting sites are normally on high sandbanks like this one.
They are traditional and probably used by many generations of gharial.
High up, the nests are protected from being washed away by floods.
The eggs are carefully transferred into the boxes and kept in the same orientation as they were laid in the nests.
A covering of moist sand is used to keep the eggs from getting wet.
The eggs are then loaded into the boats.
After roughly 70 days of incubation, the baby gharial under the sand break their eggshells and begin to hatch.
The eggs are then placed in a box and stored in a box.
The eggs are then stored in a box and stored in a box.
The eggs are stored in a box and stored in a box.
The gharial under the sand break their eggshells and begin to call.
Responding to the calls, the female begins to dig her babies out.
The male meanwhile has come out of the water and has moved up beside her.
This is much too close for her comfort and she tries to head him off.
Digging out the young is her job.
It would seem that he wants to catch a glimpse of the newborn young and pushes closer, but they are still buried under the sand.
With the male in the way, she will never complete the job of digging her young out before daybreak, so she prods him away.
Eventually he'll move back and wait behind her.
Responding to the vibrations produced by their mother's digging, the clutch begins croaking in chorus.
It's high time to get the young out of the nest.
The mother is irritable and makes it quite clear that no one is welcome near her right now.
The mother turns sideways to see the progress of her work.
Because Agariel's eyes are on top of its head, it cannot see what's going on directly underneath.
Despite the loud croaking, the second female keeps her distance.
Now the sand has been cleared away from above the eggs, hatching starts.
The baby Agariels break the shell with an egg tooth on their snout.
Only when their protruding nostrils get the first breath of air have they the energy to break out completely.
The weaker hatchlings are exhausted by the effort and rest to regain their strength.
To emerge from the egg, they pull with their front feet and then straighten their curled bodies out of the shell.
The mother simply watches them hatching and then gently scrapes both hatchlings and the empty shells out of the nest.
The hatchlings are 30 to 40 centimetres long and their average weight is about a hundred grams.
Many crocodile species carry their young to the water in their mouths, but Agariels cannot do this because their teeth are too sharp.
Also the position of their eyes makes it difficult for them to see the young in the nest below.
At one time people thought that Agariels carried their young on their backs to the water, but this was not true in this case.
The female excavated the nest in such a way that the hatchlings could climb out of it and walk down to the water by themselves.
The mother waits until she cannot hear any more hatchlings croaking in the nest. If one is trapped beneath the sand, she'll go and dig it up.
The release of the hatchlings from the nest has taken over 10 hours altogether. By the time it's all over, it's daybreak.
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You know, it takes time to do a job properly and the news is no different.
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The young are in the water.
For a fortnight the hatchlings are sustained by the yoke in their stomachs which gives them a somewhat distended look at first.
They cannot swim for long and like to climb out of the water every so often.
There is no resting platform which is safer or more willing than the floating bodies of their parents.
Why panic of waiting for the news on a combination of older announced events and
one facing the potential bad news on the spread of the news?
Women haveurgs are still looking at the big picture which one would prefer.
No matter what we listen to our actions can become adjustable and happy.
Even those involved in gossipish Lilly swept away an item to her previous purchase.
A little later the mother returns to the nest site.
One of her babies has not made it to the water.
It was crushed by mistake while she was opening the nest.
The male takes care of the youngsters while the female is out on the bank.
When it comes to parental care, the Garry owl is an amazingly gentle animal.
With no amount of coaxing from its mother will bring this hatchling back to life.
The female soon returns to the water.
Assisted by the male, she does her best to keep predators away from her hatchlings.
No bird of prey, fish, jackal or turtle will dare approach with the parents around.
They are suspicious even of their own kind.
The psyche is perfectly well-behaved.
The young gharials are only a few weeks old when the Indian monsoon season reaches its
height.
Water comes pouring down the hills.
The river swells into rushing muddy torrents, sweeping baby gharials away from their parents.
For many, life lasts less than a month.
It is estimated that only 1% of the hatchlings born survive the initial struggle for existence.
Many Indian rivers flood disastrously during the monsoon.
The reason for this is that so many of the forests have been cut down that the hillsides
have no ability to hold the water, and it just floods down in one giant rush.
This ecological imbalance brings destruction not only to the gharials, but to the people
too.
With helicopters, the army can bring relief to the people.
It's not nearly so easy to save the gharials.
Long term solutions are required to help both.
Tonight, the greatest production in television history begins.
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A thousand kilometres away from the scene of disaster, a Gariel rescue operation is in
progress at the rehabilitation centre at Kukarail in the state of Uttar Pradesh.
The Gariel eggs, which were collected earlier from the Chambal River, have now successfully
hatched here.
The babies are released into concrete pens.
More than 4,000 Gariels have been hatched in captivity since 1975 when the project was
launched.
The results are encouraging.
Forty-five percent have been successfully reared.
But in this artificial environment, the Gariels do have problems.
For a start, the centre finds it difficult to get enough fresh fish, and when it does,
some little Gariels get sick by stuffing themselves with too much, just like young children.
Then veterinary help has to be given.
This youngster is given medicine to help it digest its food.
Others refuse to eat and have to be force-fed for a few days.
Man is able to keep alive far more Gariels than would survive in the natural state.
These are four years old.
They have reached an average length of 1.5 metres and are ready to take care of themselves.
But first they have to be captured for their journey to the release site.
And then they have to leave.
One of the crest scales on their tails is cut as a mark of identification.
This does no harm and will help biologists to study the gharios' progress after release.
Currently they are packed away for the bumpy truck ride which can last up to eight hours.
The destination is the Chambal River.
Program of Media
All together, more than a thousand juvenile gharials have been killed.
The young gharials will soon be free to swim in the blue waters of the Chambal.
It was close to this spot that they were taken as eggs four years ago.
In India as a whole, the gharials still have to face the pressures of disturbance, pollution,
and the demands of the ever-increasing population on the rivers.
Some conservationists maintain that the gharial has been saved from extinction as a result of the
restocking efforts, but no one will know the outcome of the restocking for at least ten years.
The gharial will only be safe when it starts breeding again in all the rivers that were once its home,
including the mighty Ganges from which this unique fish-eating crocodilian takes its name.
The Ganges gharial needs all the help it can get.
This week on E! Street, Ali has a surprise visit from her ex-husband's girlfriend.
And Claire looks to Bob for love and understanding.
Will you be my dad's wife from Bob?
E! Street, Wednesday and Thursday, 7.30 on 10.
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It's The Comedy Company.
Beautiful.
Next on Channel 10.
The Comedy Company