The gharial's snout seems impossible: a yard of slender jaw set with about a hundred needle teeth, too thin to threaten anything but fish.Source 1Source 2
It hunts near the river bottom with swift sideways snaps, and on land it can only slide on its belly between water and warm sand.Source 1Source 3
Mature males grow a hollow knob at the snout's tip — the ghara, named for an Indian clay pot — that turns their calls into buzzing whistles.Source 4Source 2
Since the 1940s the species declined by about 98 percent; by the mid-1970s, fifty or sixty survived in India.Source 4Source 5
The rivers themselves are being unmade: sand mining strips the nesting banks, dams starve the deep pools, and fishing nets drown the long-jawed swimmers.Source 6Source 4
A female lays about forty eggs in a sandbank and guards the nest alone.Source 2
Recovery is under way one release at a time: nearly a thousand captive-reared young gharials have entered the Ganga's rivers since 2009.Source 6
Wild adults have climbed from about two hundred to about six hundred and fifty in little more than a decade.Source 6
In Nepal, community Gharial Guard Groups patrol the rivers of Chitwan, keeping watch over the nests.Source 4
To witness the gharial is to take the side of wild rivers — deep pools, clean sandbanks, room to bask.Source 6
