CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Information on the situation of crocodilians population under management (i.e. ranching), is crucial in order to verify the sustainability of the program, but it seems very difficult to be achieved with the standard night counts monitoring techniques in species with cryptic behavior like Caiman latirostris; so we present and discuss the value of the information on 15 years of eggs harvesting in one of the most studied populations of the species, in a location where harvesting effort was similar among years since the beginning of the project, and where the majority of the nests (90% to 95%) were always available for harvesting. We compared this information with our monitoring records in the same period and location. We found that nevertheless night counts showed an average recovery of the population of 50%, the number of nests and eggs harvested increased in 750%. On the other hand, we found that negative environmental conditions like droughts, affected positively the results of the night counts, with more animals counted per km. (9.2), but clearly, those years the egg harvest was lower than the ones with average environmental conditions, which produces 5 or 6 times more eggs, at the same time night counts were of 5 to 6 animals per km. Finally, we also found that the major increase in eggs harvesting, happened after the ninth year from the first reintroduction ?? releasing, which coincide with the published information on the age of sexual maturity of the species. Were proposing here to utilize the information on eggs harvest, combined with the night counts results, in order to be able to evaluate the population status of species with habitat preferences such as C. latirostris.

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