Imagine Jaws' surprise when he saw a companion after all those years. She was exactly half his size in length and width. Perhaps he was just very excited or maybe it was due to a normal state of male aggression, we don't know, because he just caught the hapless female croc between his huge jaws and thrashed her about. "Croc barbecue is delicious", said Tharak expecting the poor creature to perish any moment. Fortunately or unfortunately, his wish was not fulfilled. The female survived although with quite a few bloody marks. Thereafter she kept her distance from the water as any sane creature would, avoiding Jaws like the plague. Much later, when I visited Croc Bank a second time, it was the breeding season and there were a few nests to be excavated everyday. Each nest would occupy about the space of a medium size basket. Each egg was at least three times the size of a hen's egg and they usually numbered around 30 to 35. Every female-and each one of these measured from about 2 m to 3.5 m-would determinedly guard her nest, refusing to budge when we tried to chase her into the water in order to clean the pit. There is now a problem of excess population of the mugger crocodiles at the Croc Bank partly because they breed twice as much at the croc bank compared to in the wild and also due to their high survival rate. In the wild, at the most, one or two survive out of the 30-35 eggs as many are lost to predators, etc., but here due to artificial incubation, special enclosures, etc., a large number tend to survive. Therefore the croc bank has stopped all breeding of this species which meant that we had a surfeit of eggs for breakfast! We used to scramble the salty eggs and finish them off with sauce, although a larger number used to be sent raw for the monitor lizards' breakfast. I sometimes went snake hunting with the Irulas. The Irulas are tribals that are expert at snake catching. They formerly caught snakes for the snake skin industry. After the ban, they went out of business and found it difficult to make a living because they did not own land and did not know how to cultivate fields or do any trade at all. After the croc bank opened they were back in the business they excelled in, but this time it was to save people and snakes with snake venom extraction. Carrying only a crowbar and a few cloth bags, they would set out, overturning every bush and digging any hole that showed signs of a snake in it. Their crowbar had three uses, namely: (1) to shine light into the burrow; (2) to dig the hole and (3) to handle the snake. During my outings with the dark, short, curly haired snake hunters, we caught striped keelbacks, ratsnakes and also black scorpions.