A crocodile wildlife park in Darwin is famous for its mighty five-metre beasts but not many know about its successful breeding program. The baby crocodile nursery is a vital part of the park's operations that visitors don't usually get to see until now.
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00:00Before they become a fierce apex predator, they're small enough to be held in the palm
00:08of your hand.
00:09It's a marvel of nature that astounds even those working at Crocodylus Park.
00:14Physically looking at this baby and then looking at this large 5 metre male, it's mind blowing
00:19to kind of look at the difference and just go like how, how does this happen?
00:23Croc keepers start collecting eggs from nests around November, late after the first wet
00:29season rains.
00:30We're pulling out about, say, 50 to 60, but some nests do have up to 70 eggs.
00:35To protect the clutches from heat, floods and prey, they're incubated.
00:40We incubate ours at 32 degrees.
00:43It will predominantly give us males, but it's also, if you kind of think about it, like
00:48baking a cake.
00:49It's a good temperature to incubate at.
00:52It produces really healthy hatchlings.
00:54About 80 days later, the hatchlings emerge.
00:58Some can be really lazy, others can pip and then get out of the egg straight away, like
01:02they just want to know what the world is about.
01:05Hatchlings like this will spend just a day here at the park before they're sold and taken
01:09to one of the local crocodile farms.
01:11From there, they'll be raised until they're about 1.5 metres long or roughly four years
01:16old.
01:17Then they'll be going through the process of being culled and their skin will be used
01:21for leather and their meat will be used for goods.
01:24The breeding program helps keep the tourist park ticking over the wet season, a time when
01:29visitor numbers dip but the crocodile population booms.
01:33If we didn't kind of collect the eggs, we'd have all these baby crocodiles running around
01:38the park, which obviously isn't ideal.
01:40A lethal reptile capable of being dead cute.