Скачать или смотреть Osama The Maneating Nile Crocodile

Welcome back to Scary Animal Attacks! Today’s episode takes us to the beautiful backdrop of Lake Victoria, Uganda. Just east of the rift valley lies the portion of Uganda that abuts the northwest corner of Lake Victoria, which shares its shores with three nations. It is the second largest freshwater lake in the world and the area around it has a tremendous amount of biodiversity in the plants, and animals as well. This area varies from around twenty-two hundred to thirty-five hundred feet in elevation and has rifts and hills throughout it as it approaches the lake. It is bushland primarily with acacia trees dotting the hillside and interrupting vast expanses of savannah. The common animals here are hippos, elephants, cape buffalo, reedbucks and waterbucks. The dominant predators in the area include leopards and lions, but lurking just below the surface of the lake's waters is a particularly dangerous predator.
In nineteen ninety one, residents of the area began to go missing. Villagers around the lake frequently make their living by fishing or some other means involving the lake, or its shores. It isn’t rare for people to die by falling into the lake from their boats and drowning, but some of the victims were little kids. They were playing on the shore of the lake and were suddenly gone. There were frequently no witnesses to anything unusual.
Then fishermen started to disappear. They would go out early in the morning on the lake, like they did every day, and never return. Reports started to trickle in, from people who were in the area when someone would disappear, of a giant Nile crocodile swimming nearby. It was enough to rouse suspicion when they noticed that many of the disappearances occurred around the giant crocodile’s haunt, an area that became known as The Butchery.
Nile crocodiles are amazing survivalists. Large crocs can go up to a year without eating and when they do eat, they completely digest nearly every part of the animal they consume. A five hundred pound zebra can keep a large Nile Crocodile alive for an entire year. They can consume about half of their body weight in one sitting.
An interesting tradeoff happens in a croc's life as it grows. The prey it targets tends to be slower than the prey smaller crocs can pursue, due to the limited speed and agility of a larger croc. They begin to primarily target larger mammals at this point, especially vulnerable ones.
They stalk lions and leopards, but the cats are so quick that they are seldom caught.
A thirsty giraffe, with its legs, stretched out wide is an easy target for the stealthy crocodile. Once it clamps its jaws on the giraffe's head or one of its long legs, it may be only a matter of time before it is consumed. Slow-moving or awkward prey starts to be their specialty.
Nile crocodiles can live fifty to sixty years, so that is several decades of working on learning how best to gauge the wariness of prey and best sneak upon them. The children playing on the shoreline were easy prey for any large croc. The fishermen who were distracted tending to their nets and removing their fish to notice the silent approach of any croc who had them targeted were almost as easy.
In the first year of the disappearances, about seven people came up missing. The locals began to develop a mythos surrounding the disappearances and the presence of the large croc they had seen silently slicing through the waters.
They began to refer to the giant croc as Osama because he terrorized the population. A villager named Yazid had near-death confrontations with Osama, nine of them in fact, and had somehow managed to escape each time. The villagers thought that this was strange that so many other people were being taken by the croc but Yazid seemed to escape each time he was under attack. They believed that Osama was possessed by the devil and that Yazid had escaped only because he had made a pact with the croc. Yazid was shunned by his entire village due to the unfounded beliefs of his neighbors.
Osama was more than a crafty crocodile, he was a rapacious and bloodthirsty hunter of humans. One of his patented techniques for killing and eating fisherman was to submerge himself under a fisherman's boat. Given that crocodiles can swim in bursts at up to twenty two miles per hour you can imagine the results when he impacted each craft. Osama would send the fishermen spilling into the water and kill and eat them. He used this technique often, but seldom passed up a child filling a water bucket at the lake shore, or a woman washing clothes with her back turned. The villagers disappeared at about one person every other month from the small village. This pace of killing continued for fourteen years before the villagers finally decided to do something about Osama.