Gharial

The gharial is one of the longest crocodilians alive and is instantly recognisable by its extremely long, narrow snout, which widens slightly at the tip and holds more than a hundred teeth, the front ones the largest. In adults the snout is about three and a half times as long as the width of the skull's base. Mature males grow a hollow, bulbous knob over the nostrils at the tip of the snout, which looks like an earthen pot, or ghara, and gives the species its name. The knob starts to grow at about 11 years old and lets males make a hissing sound (Wikipedia, general species account).

The gharial is the most thoroughly aquatic of all crocodilians. Across its range it leaves the water only to bask and to build its nests on moist sandbanks, and it feeds on fish. Females mature at about 2.6 m long and males at 3 m or more. The species once lived in all the major river systems of the northern Indian subcontinent but has lost about 98% of its historical range since the 1930s, and captive-bred gharials have been released into rivers in India and Nepal since the early 1980s to reinforce the wild populations (Wikipedia, general species account).

Boat surveys of 7,680 km of 22 rivers in the Ganga basin in 2020–2023 found gharials in 13 rivers and estimated 3,037 in total. The Chambal alone held 2,097, about 69%, followed by the Ghaghra with 463, the Girwa with 158 and the Gandak with 108; the Chambal, Gandak and Ghaghra had animals of all size classes. Sand mining, heavy fishing and water extraction are the main pressures on the species (Hussain et al. 2026). The National Chambal Sanctuary, shared by Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, protects the largest population.