Texas zoo announces the hatching of 4 endangered gharial crocodiles

FORT WORTH, Texas — The Fort Worth Zoo announced Thursday that four endangered gharial crocodiles were hatched at the zoo.

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“The Zoo is thrilled to announce this monumental conservation success - the hatchings of four critically endangered gharial crocodiles,” the zoo said in a statement on Facebook.

All of the gharials at the Fort Worth Zoo are between the ages of 42 and 43, KXAS reported. They tend to live up to 50 to 60 years old.

The zoo has been working to breed the gharials to help grow the worldwide population for over a decade, the news outlet reported.

The Smithsonian National Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute says that gharials have an “elongated, narrow snout.” They also said that they have many “interlocking teeth” that line their jaws. They typically live in rivers in Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal and Pakistan. Today, they mostly live in Nepal and northern India.

Gharial crocodiles are critically endangered due to loss of their habitat following “human encroachment, unsustainable fishing practices and hunting, according to the Smithsonian National Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute. They were very close to extinction in the 1970s. Their eggs are collected as medicinal properties.

“The Fort Worth Zoo is the only institution in the United States to have produced multiple offspring of this critically endangered species,” the zoo said in a statement obtained by KXAS. “The Zoo is incredibly proud to announce this groundbreaking conservation success, quadrupling the number of births to ever take place in the U.S.”

The zoo says that in the wild there are only about 200 reproducing gharial crocodiles left.