A spectacled caiman was recently caught in Pingtung County’s Wandan Township (萬丹) after it was lured from the Gaoping River (高屏溪) using raw chicken, local authorities said on Monday.
The Pingtung County Department of Agriculture said it received a report on Tuesday morning last week about a sighting of what looked like a crocodile under a bridge near the Lunding (崙頂) community river embankment.
The department said it contacted wildlife removal specialists, who lured the animal to the shore in an effort that took three hours.
Photo courtesy of the Pingtung County Department of Agriculture
Once the reptile was within range, the contractors shot it with a tranquilizer gun and took it away to be euthanized, the department said in a statement.
The animal, identified as a male spectacled caiman, was 2.07m long and weighed 54kg, the agency said.
The reptile was behaving “aggressively” and appeared to be in robust health, the agency said.
Following the caiman’s removal, residents of the area said they believed there were “at least five” other caimans still loose in the river system.
Lee Chi-ya (李繼雅), a section chief in the department’s animal protection and conservation division, on Monday said that although she could not confirm the number of caimans in the river, no further sightings had been reported since Tuesday last week.
As for how the non-native species got into the river, Lee said it could have been an abandoned pet, or one of the caimans from a captive breeding facility that escaped into the Donggang River (東港溪) during extensive flooding in the area on June 12, 2006.
The Gaoping and Donggang rivers meet as they flow into the Taiwan Strait in Pingtung’s Hsinyuan Township (新園).
Caimans are relatively common in Taiwan’s pet industry and do not need to be registered with the government, Lee said.
The last time a caiman was removed from the wild in Pingtung was in August 2022.
In that case, the animal’s owner claimed it, Lee said.
Spectacled caimans — a species in the family Alligatoridae that is native to Latin America — gained their name because of the spectacle-like ridge between their eyes.
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