The death of a fisher taken from a boat and eaten by two crocodiles in northern Australia marks the first time a human has been preyed upon by more than one of the reptiles, the Queensland environment department believes.
On 11 February 2021 experienced sailor and angler Andrew Heard and his partner Erica Lang were moored near a creek on Hinchinbrook, a large and uninhabited island just off north Queensland’s Cassowary Coast. It was a trip the pair had made every year for a decade.
A coroner’s investigation into Heard’s death heard the couple lunched aboard their yacht, before he set out on his fibreglass dinghy for a nearby creek at about 3pm to fish for barramundi – the prized sport fish of the tropical north, whose natural habitat is roughly synonymous with the saltwater crocodile. The tender was just over 2 metres long and sat very low in the water.
The 68-year-old retiree told his partner he would be about an hour – when he failed to return by 4pm, she raised the alarm and mustered a search party.
At about 2.30am the next morning a friend found Heard’s dinghy capsized about 200 metres down a creek. A large chunk of its hull was missing. There were tooth marks on the boat.
Queensland’s environment department then became involved in the search and found, the next day, a human leg in the creek.
The department’s crocodile management team killed a saltwater crocodile, dissected it and found human remains.
At 4.86 metres long, the male crocodile was more than twice the length of Heard’s boat and almost as wide.
The next day the team killed a 2.85-metre female crocodile and recovered more remains. Tattoos, “general facial appearance” and DNA testing confirmed both sets of remains were Heard’s, the investigation was told.
Dr Matt Brien, a crocodile researcher for the environment and science department, told the coroner, Christine Roney, that damage to the mangroves near the water’s edge at the site of the attack suggested Heard had desperately tried to escape the attack.
But given the size of the male crocodile, the fisher had “almost no chance of survival once attacked”. The size of Heard’s boat had offered “next to no protection”.
Brien said that the sea turtle remains found inside the male crocodile indicated he was probably a seagoing hunter of large prey such as dugong, while the crab pots found inside the female suggested she was more a scavenger.
“While it is not unusual that a male crocodile would share a large meal with another female, to my knowledge this is the first time that two crocodiles have been recorded predating a human anywhere,” Brien wrote.
The attack occurred during crocodile breeding season – and dominant males will generally tolerate females in their territory.
The coroner’s investigation also heard the concerns of Lang for the danger posed to fishers by the “violence and predatory nature” of the fatal attack on her partner.
Based upon the evidence, Lang believed that Heard was sitting on the boat, not standing, and while it was moving.
Heard was “experienced in crocodile habitats” and unlikely to have been provocative or drawing attention to himself.
Crocodile attacks in northern Australia have been rising over recent decades as the now protected apex predators continue to rebound after they were nearly wiped out from hunting that continued until the late 1970s.
The government removes about 50 “problem crocodiles” annually, but their population management remains a hot topic in the tropics.
A recent proposal to remove more large crocodiles from Queensland’s populated far north coast drew criticism as a “silent cull” with one crocodile expert arguing it could actually put more people at risk of attack.
