Last Research Paper of Steve Irwin

Can you think about study of Crocodiles without Steve Irwin? We don't think so. Steve Irwin died, but his works will always tell us about him. He was a good researcher. Many people don't know about it. The last research paper of Steve Irwin was on Long distance Coastal travel and Homing of Translocated Estuarine Crocodiles. Yesterday only, PLoS ONE published this valuable research paper. Mark A. Read, Gordon C. Grigg, Steve R. Irwin, Danielle Shanahan and Craig E. Franklin were the researchers. And we are sure that it was just impossible to do satellite tracking of crocodiles, without Irwin.

Crocodilians have a wide distribution, often in remote areas, are cryptic, secretive and are easily disturbed by human presence. Their capacity for large scale movements is poorly known. Here, we report the first study of post-release movement patterns in translocated adult crocodiles, and the first application of satellite telemetry to a crocodilian. Three large male Crocodylus porosus (3.1–4.5 m) were captured in northern Australia and translocated by helicopter for 56, 99 and 411 km of coastline, the last across Cape York Peninsula from the west coast to the east coast. All crocodiles spent time around their release site before returning rapidly and apparently purposefully to their capture locations. The animal that circumnavigated Cape York Peninsula to return to its capture site, travelled more than 400 km in 20 days, which is the longest homeward travel yet reported for a crocodilian. From the ResearchPaper