Once endangered, American crocodiles increasing at FPL’s nuclear station safe haven

As Mike Lloret navigates his way through a network of man-made cooling canals near Florida Power & Light Co.’s Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station, he’s singular in his purpose.

A wildlife biologist for the station’s environmental research center, Lloret uses his headlamp not only to see through the darkness but to shine light onto crocodile nests sprinkled throughout the canals. That’s where he will find the hatchlings. As their eyes reflect a red shine, the crocodiles are easier to spot at night when they’re most active.

All this action begs one essential question: Are there really crocodiles in Florida?

“A lot of people don’t know we have them,” said Lloret, who added that the reptile can also be found throughout Florida’s southernmost region, including at Crocodile Lake National Wildlife Refuge in Key Largo, the Everglades National Park, and in Biscayne National Park. “The American crocodile is a misunderstood species here.”

Lloret tries to take the mystery out of understanding the crocodile, whose population is much smaller than the alligator’s. He’s studied hundreds of crocodiles on the thousands of acres of protected land that make up Turkey Point, located south of Miami on Biscayne Bay. In July and August, Lloret spends his evenings capturing hatchlings to tag them with microchips for tracking. More than 536 hatchlings have been processed and released into the wild this summer, putting Turkey Point on pace to break its record of 548.

In the 1970s, shortly after the station was built, the first crocodile nest was found in one of the its 168 linear miles of canals. For the last four decades, crocodiles have returned to the same spots, making nests just as saline water is flushed through the canals to lower the temperature of the station’s nuclear reactors.

“As you can imagine, miles of canals make looking for nests similar to finding a needle in a haystack,” Lloret said.

However, when the hatchlings are found, Lloret has just five days—the length of his permit— to tag them and catalog their biometric data. This includes clipping their scutes, or the boney scales on their tails, to create a unique pattern for each crocodile. This helps the team at Turkey Point identify them later. Once the hatchlings are caught, the biologists place them in freshwater tanks. Hatchlings are initially too young to have developed their saltwater glands, which take three months to evolve. Placing them in freshwater allows time for those salt-excreting glands to grow so the crocodile can later inhabit brackish or saltwater. The team also digs pond “nurseries” at Turkey Point to collect freshwater from rain for this purpose. Eventually the crocodile will grow from a tiny hatchling to a 15-foot-long reptile that weighs as much as 2,000 pounds. It also develops a longer, thinner snout as compared to its American alligator cousins.

In 1978, Florida Power & Light officials at Turkey Point established the crocodile management program to protect the species. Over the years, the program’s conservation initiatives, which include habitat creation, have helped move the American crocodile from the endangered species list to its now lesser threatened status. Maintaining that status means Lloret and his team have had to protect the crocodile from Florida’s rampant invasive species problem, including the influx of the Burmese python.

The internet is flooded with images of alligators being eaten by pythons and pythons by alligators, but the evidence that the same has happened to the crocodile doesn’t exist.

“Most people would agree that [attacks] have happened, it just hasn’t been proven yet,” Lloret said.

A greater danger to the crocodile may be the large Argentine black and white tegu, another invasive species to make its home in South Florida in recent years. The lizard is not going to harm a full-grown crocodile. Rather, the tegu eats the crocodile eggs, making it a generational threat to the species. Footage has shown a tegu entering an alligator nest each day until every egg was consumed. At Turkey Point, officials have established trap lines on the western and northern corridors and have caught 12 tegu this year alone, which Lloret said is a low number as compared to other nearby locations where the lizard makes its home. The ones trapped at Turkey Point are primarily adult males, indicating a low likelihood that the tegus are breeding on the property.

Man-made influences also affect the American crocodile. Habitat destruction due to construction in South Florida has diminished environments for the species. There’s also the issue of a warming planet. Some biologists have raised concern about whether rising atmospheric temperatures causes more male hatchlings to be born. Lloret said it’s difficult to discern a hatchling’s sex early on because both male and female anatomy look alike in the initial stages of life. To determine if climate change is having an effect, biologists would have to track the crocodiles at one to two years of age and document the sex organs, something Turkey Point researchers are not focusing on.

Human beings may be disturbing the American crocodiles’ habitat, but when it comes to encroaching on man’s territory, they are a shy species.

“Crocodiles have proven not to be a threat to humans,” Lloret said, adding there has been only one attack on a person in the wild.

A couple was bitten while swimming at night in an area frequented by the crocodile but were released when it was determined the humans weren’t prey.

And this may be the reason Lloret navigates the canals with ease, unencumbered.

“The word ‘crocodile’ has a negative connation, like it’s a blood-thirsty beast,” he said. “They could very well kill us or injure us – but they don’t.”