What is CrocBITE?

CrocBITE is a learning and research tool based around a database of recorded attacks by crocodilians on humans worldwide. By "crocodilians" we mean any species of crocodile, alligator, caiman or gharial. It is also an archive for attack data that might otherwise be lost. 

The ultimate goal of CrocBITE is to improve human safety and assist conservation of crocodilians by improving our understanding of risk factors and trends over time for different species in different countries. New attack data are being continually added to the database as they occur, and historical attacks (ie. before the present year) are being added over time.

Our objective in making this information freely available online is not to demonize crocodiles or over-emphasize the danger that they pose, but rather to put the risk of being attacked into perspective, to better understand why people are attacked by crocodiles and to ultimately reduce human-crocodile conflict. Crocodiles are wild animals, they are neither malicious nor evil, yet they are capable and powerful predators that occasionally attack humans. Conservation of crocodiles goes hand-in-hand with an understanding of and indeed respect for crocodiles, and attacks by crocodiles on humans are obviously counterproductive to these goals. Improved safety is a realistic and achievable goal, and this website hopes to contribute towards that.

How accurate is the database?

CrocBITE does not pretend to be 100% complete, such a goal would be impossible because quite a few crocodile attacks go unreported every year for a variety of reasons. People may be attacked without any witnesses or evidence, attacks may be known locally but never reported or recorded, records may be difficult to obtain, historical reports may have become unavailable, some regions or countries may choose to hide or suppress records of crocodile attack for political or social reasons, or may simply lack the resources or motivation to record such data in the first place. It is difficult to gauge the proportion of attacks that go unrecorded each year, although it's reasonable to assume that most attacks are recorded in some way. Considerable credit must go to the dozens of contributors who have helped to fill in blanks, verify records and provide hard-to-find data.

While every effort has been made to verify each record added to the database, errors made during recording or reporting closer to source are difficult to judge. For example, attack survivors tend to exaggerate the size of the crocodile involved, which is why relatively few (less than 15%) of our records contain the size of the crocodile. We have tried to address this uncertainty by ranking the quality of key variables in each record, based on strict criteria which are detailed under each incident.

It is also useful to consider loss of data as we go further back in time. Today's reporting of crocodile attack incidents is considerably better than even a few years ago, although there is still an emphasis towards attacks on certain groups of people. It is an unavoidable fact that a European tourist attacked by a Nile crocodile is much more likely to make the news than if the victim were African, and tracking down information on the latter requires considerably more detective work. It is also clear that crocodile attack records are rarely kept for more than a few years, after which they could be lost forever. Reports that we logged even last year have in some cases already disappeared from media archives. This makes continual logging of data and archiving of such data by CrocBITE all the more important to build a picture of trends and patterns over time. It also means that the further back in time we go, the more data that are likely to be missing, although there are exceptions due to efficient reporting and recording practices in certain countries (eg. USA, Australia).

At present we have also chosen to exclude any attacks by captive or wild crocodilians on staff or officials while working with them, otherwise we would have to consider the many hundreds if not thousands of bites both minor and serious that have been received due to carelessness, improper handling or inadequate safety procedures.

Despite all these caveats, the database contains valuable information necessary to better understand patterns, trends and scenarios that will improve our understanding of human-crocodile conflict.