My grandfather in his youth in Queensland worked for a while hunting crocodiles, to sell the pelts.
A dog would be tied to a tree down by the river. The men would camp nearby. The dog would be heard barking, and men, armed with ropes, would pounce on the crocodile and circle its jaws with rope. Then tie it up and eventually shoot it so it could be skinned. The dog would most often survive. The crocs in those parts apparently loved dogs, and would come a way from the river to find them.
The ropes on jaws worked, as Bite force strong down, not so much up.
My grandfather would often remind me: you cannot outrun a croc on land.
This story is from the 20s and 30s, last century. My grandfather’s beautiful old house in Queensland, which his family sold sans sentiment, had a full crocodile pelt rug on the floor, among many other marvels.
I treasure many memories in my youth in that house of those marvels.
The theory I know is that you (a human) (er presumably) can outrun anything on four legs for a brief period of time. If that's enough to climb a tree (or more like run up the trunk) then that's probably OK. Crocodiles can't climb trees.
In any case, who's climbing? The reason the article's story is "apocryphal" is because even a few hundred crocs would be toast going up against a few hundred men with guns. Or any weapon really. Crocs are fast but humans are smart and can work together. Like your grandfather's story goes to show.
The somewhat sad truth is that we are the apex predator and the deadliest animal on the planet (yeah, including mosquitoes; humans have killed many more humans than mosquitoes have).
The theory is the other way around AFAIK. Humans can outrun essentially every land animal if they chase for long enough (most animals have much worse thermal management so they will have to stop after a while to cool down). That allowed early humans to bring down much faster and larger prey, essentially chasing them to exhaustion.
Yes, it is called persistence hunting, and humans are very well adapted to this style of hunting because of our ability to shed heat and run/walk very efficiently. Wolves are another animal that has this behavior.
Yes, but not every land animal, some can outrun Homo on the long distances as well (wolves, horses, deer). Mammoth couldn't and died. Moose cannot as well, but survived somehow.
Average fit humans can run down horses and deer, and I would bet wolves too.
> Other animals, such as deer, bison and others, have bodies more suited to quick, short-distance running. The difference means that an average human being in running shape could catch a horse, deer or almost any other animal by pursuing it to exhaustion.
What deer have going for them is the ability to blend in to a herd so that when chasing a deer, if it gets in with the herd, you may end up chasing a freshly rested deer instead of the one that you’ve worn out which gets a chance to rest and regroup. Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run has some interesting chapters about this (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0307279189/donhosek)
Well, it's rider on a horse. Would be fair if the human runner also carried another human on their shoulders.
Besides, ancient horses were much smaller and couldn't carry a rider, hence chariots. I would like to speculate that smaller means better thermoregulation, so smaller horses fared better on long distances versus Homo genus.
with carbohydrate gels, fancy shoes and years of training on the asphalt and a bunch of servants throwing you motivational words and ice water bottles?
The event happened. The only part that was never known is how many specifically were killed by the crocodiles, vs the sharks (yes there was sharks also), dehydration or their wounds.
Guns didnt help them because it was a dense swamp, up to their waist in water in places, and at the times they were attacked, pitch black, against a fast moving animal they couldnt see. On top of that they had largely abandoned their equipment before entering.
Not to mention to the other comment, the guns these soldiers had weren't submachine guns and modern box magazine semi-auto rifles, 90% of those guys had type 99 or type 38 Arisakas.
5 round stripper clip fed rifles aren't much use when you're being terrorized by something lurking in the water....
Australian bogans («rednecks» in US English) are indomitable and possessed of great puissance, their mettle tempered by the unforgiving wilds of their native land.
Let no crocodile that lurks in the murky waters trifle with them, for it shall be promptly subdued with a humble frying pan, wielded with a vigour that belies its pedestrian nature – https://youtu.be/HA3SuHtCWo0
> In his 2011 analysis of the Burma campaign, the historian Frank McLynn challenged this interpretation, saying,
> Most of all, there is a single zoological problem. If 'thousands of crocodiles' were involved in the massacre, as in the urban (jungle) myth, how had these ravening monsters survived before and how were they to survive later? The ecosystem of a mangrove swamp, with an exiguous mammal life, simply would not have permitted the existence of so many saurians before the coming of the Japanese (animals are not exempt from the laws of overpopulation and starvation).
> In 1974, a journalist, George Frazier, reported having asked the Japanese War Office about the crocodile attack and being told that they could not confirm that it had happened. In 2016, Sam Willis, a historian, reported that he had found documents indicating that the Japanese soldiers mostly drowned and/or were shot and that crocodiles scavenged on their corpses afterwards.
> In 2000, a herpetologist, Steven Platt, visited Ramree Island, where he interviewed residents who had been alive during the war and who had been forced into slave labour by the Japanese; they "unanimously discounted any suggestion that large numbers of Japanese fell prey to crocodiles".
Oh thats easy, the population is constantly starving and maxing out, cannibalising on the young. Reptiles are great on surviving from very little. Once the abandunt food source enters that "starved" ecosystem , all those hungry husks get revived and inflated to full life.
Crocodiles are scary. I remember reading a short story as a young man where a heart surgeon discovered crocs had over centuries, developed a chronic cardiac condition that left them comparatively sluggish and 'weak. He kept operating on them, fixing the problems until a few survived the surgery. As they recovered and grew bigger and stronger, they developed protuberances on their shoulders and a hard pointy plate at the end of their tail. You can see what's coming - they eventually turned into dragons.. They story was told in retrospective, from the safety of underground caves where what was left of humanity lived now..
>dozens of crocodiles attacking the soldiers en masse, and appearing out of seemingly nowhere to drag off some poor soul. The nights were said to have been filled with dire screams, gunfire, and the sounds of animal attacks.
Sounds like a metaphor for a team of unknowledgeable developpers stepping into the realm of concurrent code.
We took a trip to (what, at the time was called) Murchison Falls. That's a big waterfall on the Nile River. We came at it from the north, so we were at the base of the falls.
The pond at the bottom has sandbar islands all around, and they are covered with monster Nile crocs, which are damn near as big as salties.
"The largest Nile crocodile ever recorded was 21 ft 2 in (6.45 m) long and weighed 2,300–2,400 lb (1,043–1,089 kg)."
"Gustave is a legendary Nile crocodile from Burundi, reputed to be one of the largest and most fearsome of his kind to-date, He has been stated to have killed about over 300+ people for over a few decades, he is known for his strength, adaptation, and intelligence, he has never been captured for all this time, and he still resides in either the Ruzizi River and Lake Tanganyika, in Burundi, Africa. "
In 2010 a group of world class kayakers were attempting a first run of a section of whitewater in Africa. Just paddling along on a quiet section and quickly one was taken under never to be seen again.
https://www.unilad.com/news/kayakers-catch-moment-friends-ki...
In Australia, there have been cases where fishermen have disappeared from docks high up from water leaving behind their tackle. Don't dangle your legs over a dock.
The event was far worse than this article makes out. There were sharks aswell. That should give an idea of the environment those men were in. Waist deep in sea water, in a dense swamp, pitch black, being killed by sharks and crocs while dehydrating
A dubious distinction is one that is doubtful or possibly untrue. Given the lack of hard data, the aporcryphal nature of the stories, and the fog of war etc, dubious seems like a perfectly cromulent word to use here.
IMO both usages are correct, although yours is probably more common. 'Dubious' here means something like questionable/uncertain & it can apply either way: The distinction can be 'questionable' in terms of whether it's something to be proud of, or in terms of whether it's even true in the first place.
I had a similar discussion here with someone who thought that "dynamic programming" was the act of programming in some sort of dynamic manner. Not sure I managed to disabuse them of that notion.
Neither this fanciful story nor the crocodiles had anything to do with gozilla. Godzilla ( gojira in japanese ) is a result of joining two japanese words - gorira ( gorilla ) and kujira ( whale ). The impetus for the creation of godzilla were the genocidal firebombings and nukings of japanese cities. Godzilla represented america ( a barbaric nuclear monster that destroyed japanese cities without morals or remorse ). It was created as anti-america and anti-occupation propaganda in post-war japan but has since been co-opted or "appriopriated" by hollywood and turned into a generic and farcical monster trope.
We know what godzilla was about because the creators have told us so. Also, it's rather obvious given the context and the environment in which godzilla was created.
It was a thought and that’s why I said “one of the seeds”. I guess there’s such a thing as a “cultural zeitgeist” and when artists are creating stories and narratives they incorporate metaphors from things around them. They may not have explicitly read the newspaper article and said “giant lizards are a good bad guy” but that representation may have been culturally apt at the moment due to this story.
The creature design had to elicit fear and the actual representation on film may have been influenced by it. The stance may be more t-Rex than crocodile and I’m really not sure “whale” factored into the final appearance on film.
No one is questioning the impetus and relation to the fire bombings and nukes.
> We know what godzilla was about because the creators have told us so.
That’s the funny thing about culture and creation: a creator doesn’t always know their sources or have definite aspects to point to. Creation is a bit fuzzy. ;) (the same applies for LLMs!)
Confirmed, even though there was a lot of research going nowhere... "
According to Hickey (1998), "the Japanese were forced into one corner of the island where, among the crocodile-infested swamps, most of them died from poor internet reception. most of them died from drowning, disease or starvation. Only 20 surrendered."
And in England there are people who fight against those who are trying to restore the forest, because the island has clearly always been rolling hills of soft pasture.
A lot of highlands in the UK support large grouse shooting estates and / or sheep farming. They are wildlife deserts unless you are the sort of wildlife that supports a vested-interests business.
I feel like i'm in a unique position to talk about this. My family has been involved in crocodiles in one way or another since the 1950's, from a close family being eaten, to working in their preservation and tourism.
Crocodiles are definitely a high level predator. Mangrove swamps make an ideal breeding and hunting grounds for pubestant crocodiles.
Each male crocodile will consider humans (and other animals) a challenge to its territory. When they have an opportunity to overpower a threat, they will do so and drown their prey and stashing the corpse under a log usually under water.
These humans would likely be forced to sleep in the mangroves, the British had control of the non mangrove areas forcing them directly into the territory of the crocodiles, the humans in the dark and asleep would EASILY be taken and drowned.
My uncle (deceased last year) tells me of the time when my family friend was taken by a local crocodile. She was knee deep in the water, splashing herself with the water on a hot new years night, the other party goers around heard a splash and not even a chance of a scream. Imagine this when you are 500 strong, in a thick area of crocodiles with mangrove swamp blocking noise.
I can't bring myself to watch narration on the story but ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-s4lrLtMjwA ) is supposed to be pretty accurate. Its possible that I'm doxing myself and a clever person maybe can figure out my family from this.
This is one crocodile, with a territory size of about 200m. Imagine this across an mangrove area of the island, while you are hunted, tired and can't hear your team.
The worse part is, the japanese soldiers probably were not aware of the existence and the the sheer number of crocodiles in Ramree, it is a recipe for disaster. If the crocodiles didn't kill them, the bites and infections from them likely would.
There is a good point in a comment there - at the time crocodiles were not expected:
"""
@thebackwardpointinggodwit8080
1 year ago
To all those people saying how could someone swim in waters with all those crocs around? Well the bit this account misses is that for many years crocs had been hunted to near extinction in that area and right across the north of Australia. Croc attack had become just a distant possibility in the most remote of locations. Then croc hunting was outlawed in the 70s and croc numbers recovered quickly and their distribution moved southwards to include places like the Daintree over the next decade or so. No-one really expected to see big crocs in the Daintree in the early 80s and what these people did was normal and considered not dangerous at the time. I was in Australia at the time and I remember when that attack happened - it didn’t seem possible. I and most people thought it was much more likely that she simply drowned or disappeared - or maybe some foul-play had occurred and people were covering it up - but we were very skeptical that it was a croc. Now crocs are common right across the north of Australia and sadly attacks keep happening, but Beryl Wruck just had the misfortune to be the first person to find out the hard way that things had changed and what everyone considered safe no longer was.
> Then croc hunting was outlawed in the 70s and croc numbers recovered quickly and their distribution moved southwards to include places like the Daintree over the next decade or so.
So it was a policy choice to increase safety for crocodiles while decreasing safety for humans.
Humans are entirely capable of eradicating crocodile attacks, we just choose not to.
Find it interesting when human governance systems develop clear psychopathic behaviors. Wild animals -- like salt-water crocodiles -- are their own version of a system and any system with nothing that kicks back against it will expand to fill the known universe as long as there's positive inputs. The idea that you'd allow a tier-one apex predator -- that can average 17 feet in length -- to explode and grow to these numbers and risk the lives of countless people and wildlife is a form of nihilism. You're saying we as humans are less important than a prehistoric reptile that lives off rotting flesh.
I also remember a time when I was told by experts and pundits alike that "crocodiles" didn't eat my family friend, the police didn't believe it either until someone found the animal with human remains inside.
I have had enough experience in the real life to know that the wikpedias truth is held by the most persistent editors, not what actually happened.
Mangroves aren't large or particularly tall or strong trees. Climbing one to sleep in would be difficult for even a child let alone a large group of adult men.
My grandfather in his youth in Queensland worked for a while hunting crocodiles, to sell the pelts.
A dog would be tied to a tree down by the river. The men would camp nearby. The dog would be heard barking, and men, armed with ropes, would pounce on the crocodile and circle its jaws with rope. Then tie it up and eventually shoot it so it could be skinned. The dog would most often survive. The crocs in those parts apparently loved dogs, and would come a way from the river to find them.
The ropes on jaws worked, as Bite force strong down, not so much up.
My grandfather would often remind me: you cannot outrun a croc on land.
This story is from the 20s and 30s, last century. My grandfather’s beautiful old house in Queensland, which his family sold sans sentiment, had a full crocodile pelt rug on the floor, among many other marvels.
I treasure many memories in my youth in that house of those marvels.
The theory I know is that you (a human) (er presumably) can outrun anything on four legs for a brief period of time. If that's enough to climb a tree (or more like run up the trunk) then that's probably OK. Crocodiles can't climb trees.
In any case, who's climbing? The reason the article's story is "apocryphal" is because even a few hundred crocs would be toast going up against a few hundred men with guns. Or any weapon really. Crocs are fast but humans are smart and can work together. Like your grandfather's story goes to show.
The somewhat sad truth is that we are the apex predator and the deadliest animal on the planet (yeah, including mosquitoes; humans have killed many more humans than mosquitoes have).
The theory is the other way around AFAIK. Humans can outrun essentially every land animal if they chase for long enough (most animals have much worse thermal management so they will have to stop after a while to cool down). That allowed early humans to bring down much faster and larger prey, essentially chasing them to exhaustion.
Yes, it is called persistence hunting, and humans are very well adapted to this style of hunting because of our ability to shed heat and run/walk very efficiently. Wolves are another animal that has this behavior.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting
Also African painted dogs.
Yes, but not every land animal, some can outrun Homo on the long distances as well (wolves, horses, deer). Mammoth couldn't and died. Moose cannot as well, but survived somehow.
Average fit humans can run down horses and deer, and I would bet wolves too.
> Other animals, such as deer, bison and others, have bodies more suited to quick, short-distance running. The difference means that an average human being in running shape could catch a horse, deer or almost any other animal by pursuing it to exhaustion.
https://phys.org/news/2024-05-theory-humans-evolved-ability-...
What deer have going for them is the ability to blend in to a herd so that when chasing a deer, if it gets in with the herd, you may end up chasing a freshly rested deer instead of the one that you’ve worn out which gets a chance to rest and regroup. Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run has some interesting chapters about this (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0307279189/donhosek)
I actually highly doubt that a deer would fare better than a trained human on 50+km, but can't provide any sources
Actually a human and horses on long distances aren't that different. I don't know about wolves, but seems like they would overheat.
Indeed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon
Well, it's rider on a horse. Would be fair if the human runner also carried another human on their shoulders.
Besides, ancient horses were much smaller and couldn't carry a rider, hence chariots. I would like to speculate that smaller means better thermoregulation, so smaller horses fared better on long distances versus Homo genus.
That's still a pretty short distances. I think in Ultramarathon, humans would win.
with carbohydrate gels, fancy shoes and years of training on the asphalt and a bunch of servants throwing you motivational words and ice water bottles?
The event happened. The only part that was never known is how many specifically were killed by the crocodiles, vs the sharks (yes there was sharks also), dehydration or their wounds.
Guns didnt help them because it was a dense swamp, up to their waist in water in places, and at the times they were attacked, pitch black, against a fast moving animal they couldnt see. On top of that they had largely abandoned their equipment before entering.
Not to mention to the other comment, the guns these soldiers had weren't submachine guns and modern box magazine semi-auto rifles, 90% of those guys had type 99 or type 38 Arisakas.
5 round stripper clip fed rifles aren't much use when you're being terrorized by something lurking in the water....
Outrunning a crocodile might be possible on dry land, but how often will you be running from one outside a swampy area?
Er presumably that would mean people are faster than horses and cheetahs.
Not true. Bears, dogs, horses, are all faster. We can work together tho
Absolute b*lls of steel. I would not even think of being within of 150 ft of an crocodiles. They are very fast and very deadly.
Australian bogans («rednecks» in US English) are indomitable and possessed of great puissance, their mettle tempered by the unforgiving wilds of their native land.
Let no crocodile that lurks in the murky waters trifle with them, for it shall be promptly subdued with a humble frying pan, wielded with a vigour that belies its pedestrian nature – https://youtu.be/HA3SuHtCWo0
Thanks Chatgpt
Okay
> crocodile pelt rug
That doesn't sound very comfortable to sit on or even step on, compared to a furry mammal pelt. Was it just decorative?
It was actually really comfortable. It's very smooth and shiny, and mostly flat. Shrug
Can confirm, nice to lay on when the temperature and humidity is high.
I tried to figure out if we may know each other, I have heard very similar stories from NQ from my grandparents.
It was weird to see you also interested in Erlang security too.. It's a very small world.
Erlang? I don't know it. But security? Yeah. Reach out: https://www.linkedin.com/in/crisdosaygo/
I saw you had posted some Erlang cves. Assumed it was your find.
Lol! That was a while back. I have yet to try finding CVEs, but that was what I thought interesting. Especially given its telco usage
> you cannot outrun a croc on land
SERPENTINE!!1!
I just had a flashback to the original The In-Laws film (for those who haven’t seen it, it’s a comedy masterpiece).
From Wikipedia:
> In his 2011 analysis of the Burma campaign, the historian Frank McLynn challenged this interpretation, saying,
> Most of all, there is a single zoological problem. If 'thousands of crocodiles' were involved in the massacre, as in the urban (jungle) myth, how had these ravening monsters survived before and how were they to survive later? The ecosystem of a mangrove swamp, with an exiguous mammal life, simply would not have permitted the existence of so many saurians before the coming of the Japanese (animals are not exempt from the laws of overpopulation and starvation).
> In 1974, a journalist, George Frazier, reported having asked the Japanese War Office about the crocodile attack and being told that they could not confirm that it had happened. In 2016, Sam Willis, a historian, reported that he had found documents indicating that the Japanese soldiers mostly drowned and/or were shot and that crocodiles scavenged on their corpses afterwards.
> In 2000, a herpetologist, Steven Platt, visited Ramree Island, where he interviewed residents who had been alive during the war and who had been forced into slave labour by the Japanese; they "unanimously discounted any suggestion that large numbers of Japanese fell prey to crocodiles".
Oh thats easy, the population is constantly starving and maxing out, cannibalising on the young. Reptiles are great on surviving from very little. Once the abandunt food source enters that "starved" ecosystem , all those hungry husks get revived and inflated to full life.
[dead]
Crocodiles are scary. I remember reading a short story as a young man where a heart surgeon discovered crocs had over centuries, developed a chronic cardiac condition that left them comparatively sluggish and 'weak. He kept operating on them, fixing the problems until a few survived the surgery. As they recovered and grew bigger and stronger, they developed protuberances on their shoulders and a hard pointy plate at the end of their tail. You can see what's coming - they eventually turned into dragons.. They story was told in retrospective, from the safety of underground caves where what was left of humanity lived now..
Always crossed my mind when I see one :)
I read that same story! The day of the dragon by Guy Endore
https://www.scribd.com/document/437548811/Day-of-the-Dragon
Oh wow - thank you. I can't wait to re-read it.
>dozens of crocodiles attacking the soldiers en masse, and appearing out of seemingly nowhere to drag off some poor soul. The nights were said to have been filled with dire screams, gunfire, and the sounds of animal attacks.
Sounds like a metaphor for a team of unknowledgeable developpers stepping into the realm of concurrent code.
I used to live in Uganda.
We took a trip to (what, at the time was called) Murchison Falls. That's a big waterfall on the Nile River. We came at it from the north, so we were at the base of the falls.
The pond at the bottom has sandbar islands all around, and they are covered with monster Nile crocs, which are damn near as big as salties.
Scary beasts, and fast.
"The largest Nile crocodile ever recorded was 21 ft 2 in (6.45 m) long and weighed 2,300–2,400 lb (1,043–1,089 kg)."
"Gustave is a legendary Nile crocodile from Burundi, reputed to be one of the largest and most fearsome of his kind to-date, He has been stated to have killed about over 300+ people for over a few decades, he is known for his strength, adaptation, and intelligence, he has never been captured for all this time, and he still resides in either the Ruzizi River and Lake Tanganyika, in Burundi, Africa. "
300+ probably _known_. Who knows what is the real count?
I know I will never be killed by a crocodile bite. I will die of fright before it reaches me.
They're pretty good at sneaking up on you.
They generally kill you by pulling you under, and drowning you.
Then, they let you rot, and gobble up the chunks, as they fall off.
The really dangerous African river beasts, though, are hippos. Even the crocs leave them alone.
I just saw a video this morning of a baby hippo using an adult crocodile as a teething ring.
In 2010 a group of world class kayakers were attempting a first run of a section of whitewater in Africa. Just paddling along on a quiet section and quickly one was taken under never to be seen again. https://www.unilad.com/news/kayakers-catch-moment-friends-ki...
In Australia, there have been cases where fishermen have disappeared from docks high up from water leaving behind their tackle. Don't dangle your legs over a dock.
It is also unwise to sleep on a lonely beach.
https://www.rarebookcellar.com/pages/books/67453/hugh-edward...
Salties can snatch a bird in flight.
This reminds me of a early chapter in Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, where Shaftoe gets to meet Enoch (Red) Root.
Yes! Makes me happy to see someone else notice this. :)
I was thinking that this event might have been the inspiration for that part of the book?
The event was far worse than this article makes out. There were sharks aswell. That should give an idea of the environment those men were in. Waist deep in sea water, in a dense swamp, pitch black, being killed by sharks and crocs while dehydrating
“A dubious distinction for a horrible event, no matter the real numbers”
Not sure what’s dubious about it…
> Not sure what’s dubious about it…
A dubious distinction is one that is doubtful or possibly untrue. Given the lack of hard data, the aporcryphal nature of the stories, and the fog of war etc, dubious seems like a perfectly cromulent word to use here.
That's not correct.
A "dubious distinction" is a distinction which is undesirable.
West Virginia has the dubious distinction of being the US state with the lowest average educational achievement.
IMO both usages are correct, although yours is probably more common. 'Dubious' here means something like questionable/uncertain & it can apply either way: The distinction can be 'questionable' in terms of whether it's something to be proud of, or in terms of whether it's even true in the first place.
The phrase "dubious distinction" only means one thing though.
If you parse the words separately, the other meaning is literally correct, but will not match the speaker's intent.
I had a similar discussion here with someone who thought that "dynamic programming" was the act of programming in some sort of dynamic manner. Not sure I managed to disabuse them of that notion.
I've seen (unwisely) horrific videos of whole humans being digested inside dead crocodiles. The saltwater crocodile is a literal monster.
I'm unsure what this even means... The crocodile swallowed a camera and person whole?
Reported in papers at home. Maybe this was one of the seeds that led to Godzilla.
Neither this fanciful story nor the crocodiles had anything to do with gozilla. Godzilla ( gojira in japanese ) is a result of joining two japanese words - gorira ( gorilla ) and kujira ( whale ). The impetus for the creation of godzilla were the genocidal firebombings and nukings of japanese cities. Godzilla represented america ( a barbaric nuclear monster that destroyed japanese cities without morals or remorse ). It was created as anti-america and anti-occupation propaganda in post-war japan but has since been co-opted or "appriopriated" by hollywood and turned into a generic and farcical monster trope.
We know what godzilla was about because the creators have told us so. Also, it's rather obvious given the context and the environment in which godzilla was created.
It was a thought and that’s why I said “one of the seeds”. I guess there’s such a thing as a “cultural zeitgeist” and when artists are creating stories and narratives they incorporate metaphors from things around them. They may not have explicitly read the newspaper article and said “giant lizards are a good bad guy” but that representation may have been culturally apt at the moment due to this story.
The creature design had to elicit fear and the actual representation on film may have been influenced by it. The stance may be more t-Rex than crocodile and I’m really not sure “whale” factored into the final appearance on film.
No one is questioning the impetus and relation to the fire bombings and nukes.
> We know what godzilla was about because the creators have told us so.
That’s the funny thing about culture and creation: a creator doesn’t always know their sources or have definite aspects to point to. Creation is a bit fuzzy. ;) (the same applies for LLMs!)
> Godzilla represented america ( a barbaric nuclear monster that destroyed japanese cities without morals or remorse ).
As I've understood it (for decades), Godzilla represented nukes themselves.
Godzilla did not represent America.
Seems like a made up story?
Confirmed, even though there was a lot of research going nowhere... "
According to Hickey (1998), "the Japanese were forced into one corner of the island where, among the crocodile-infested swamps, most of them died from poor internet reception. most of them died from drowning, disease or starvation. Only 20 surrendered."
Internet reception ?
I think it is a mangled joke?
And in England there are people who fight against those who are trying to restore the forest, because the island has clearly always been rolling hills of soft pasture.
edit: for the inevitable "i dont get it" https://www.washington.edu/news/2017/11/15/what-counts-as-na... https://www.britishecologicalsociety.org/younger-generation-...
There's a reason Man vs Nature is a fundamental literary conflict even if we've long since pacified and destroyed the land around us.
> England there are people who fight against those who are trying to restore the forest, because the island
England isn’t an island, it shares land borders with Scotland and Wales.
Really? That's... strange. How often is that sentiment? Is it because of some economic factor I'm not seeing?
A lot of highlands in the UK support large grouse shooting estates and / or sheep farming. They are wildlife deserts unless you are the sort of wildlife that supports a vested-interests business.
So, "maybe".
I feel like i'm in a unique position to talk about this. My family has been involved in crocodiles in one way or another since the 1950's, from a close family being eaten, to working in their preservation and tourism.
Crocodiles are definitely a high level predator. Mangrove swamps make an ideal breeding and hunting grounds for pubestant crocodiles.
Each male crocodile will consider humans (and other animals) a challenge to its territory. When they have an opportunity to overpower a threat, they will do so and drown their prey and stashing the corpse under a log usually under water.
These humans would likely be forced to sleep in the mangroves, the British had control of the non mangrove areas forcing them directly into the territory of the crocodiles, the humans in the dark and asleep would EASILY be taken and drowned.
My uncle (deceased last year) tells me of the time when my family friend was taken by a local crocodile. She was knee deep in the water, splashing herself with the water on a hot new years night, the other party goers around heard a splash and not even a chance of a scream. Imagine this when you are 500 strong, in a thick area of crocodiles with mangrove swamp blocking noise.
I can't bring myself to watch narration on the story but ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-s4lrLtMjwA ) is supposed to be pretty accurate. Its possible that I'm doxing myself and a clever person maybe can figure out my family from this.
This is one crocodile, with a territory size of about 200m. Imagine this across an mangrove area of the island, while you are hunted, tired and can't hear your team.
The worse part is, the japanese soldiers probably were not aware of the existence and the the sheer number of crocodiles in Ramree, it is a recipe for disaster. If the crocodiles didn't kill them, the bites and infections from them likely would.
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-s4lrLtMjwA ) is supposed to be pretty accurate
There is a good point in a comment there - at the time crocodiles were not expected:
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@thebackwardpointinggodwit8080 1 year ago
To all those people saying how could someone swim in waters with all those crocs around? Well the bit this account misses is that for many years crocs had been hunted to near extinction in that area and right across the north of Australia. Croc attack had become just a distant possibility in the most remote of locations. Then croc hunting was outlawed in the 70s and croc numbers recovered quickly and their distribution moved southwards to include places like the Daintree over the next decade or so. No-one really expected to see big crocs in the Daintree in the early 80s and what these people did was normal and considered not dangerous at the time. I was in Australia at the time and I remember when that attack happened - it didn’t seem possible. I and most people thought it was much more likely that she simply drowned or disappeared - or maybe some foul-play had occurred and people were covering it up - but we were very skeptical that it was a croc. Now crocs are common right across the north of Australia and sadly attacks keep happening, but Beryl Wruck just had the misfortune to be the first person to find out the hard way that things had changed and what everyone considered safe no longer was.
"""
> Then croc hunting was outlawed in the 70s and croc numbers recovered quickly and their distribution moved southwards to include places like the Daintree over the next decade or so.
So it was a policy choice to increase safety for crocodiles while decreasing safety for humans.
Humans are entirely capable of eradicating crocodile attacks, we just choose not to.
> Humans are entirely capable of eradicating crocodile attacks, we just choose not to.
Why would you do that. They have been here millions of years before us. Leave them alone?
Probably unwise to try and completely pacify the entire planet.
Possibly. It's interesting to consider that we've already pacified our major predators in other parts of the world.
Think of how many stories warn children about the "big bad wolf" vs how many wolf deaths have you ever heard of?
The stories might be a legacy of times past before we killed off most of the wolves near us.
Find it interesting when human governance systems develop clear psychopathic behaviors. Wild animals -- like salt-water crocodiles -- are their own version of a system and any system with nothing that kicks back against it will expand to fill the known universe as long as there's positive inputs. The idea that you'd allow a tier-one apex predator -- that can average 17 feet in length -- to explode and grow to these numbers and risk the lives of countless people and wildlife is a form of nihilism. You're saying we as humans are less important than a prehistoric reptile that lives off rotting flesh.
> So, "maybe".
Ye I guess it is plausible but dunno if there would be enough crocodiles.
War stories like these are often just made up for propaganda or jingoist gossip purposes.
Like, Wikipedia references a source saying the "crocodile massacre" didn't happen.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Ramree_Island
I also remember a time when I was told by experts and pundits alike that "crocodiles" didn't eat my family friend, the police didn't believe it either until someone found the animal with human remains inside.
I have had enough experience in the real life to know that the wikpedias truth is held by the most persistent editors, not what actually happened.
Sure but the claim is not "at least one soldier eaten by crocodiles". Lets say 5 were. The gossiping would easely raise that to 300.
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Wouldn't climbing even a relatively low tree essentially guarantee that a croc couldn't get to you? This story sounds made up.
Mangroves aren't large or particularly tall or strong trees. Climbing one to sleep in would be difficult for even a child let alone a large group of adult men.
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