Unique crocodile species in Africa receives specialized conservation efforts.

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The fate of a crocodile species considered Africa’s newest and rarest is being linked to a zoo in the heart of Ivory Coast’s economic capital, Abidjan, which recently faced an uncertain future. The crocodile, slender and snouted, was discovered by an American scientist at the zoo itself and is now struggling to survive.

“Essentially what we did, we kind of looked at some of the historic literature, and I don’t mean from 20 or 30 years ago, I mean from 150 years ago at what some of these very early British and French natural historians were recognizing about crocodiles across the landscape and what they were describing as unique species, based on what characters and why, and some of them made sense, or maybe made sense. Some of them didn’t. We kind of overlaid some of those hypotheses about species on the landscape, on the west and central African landscape and said ok, we’ve got a bunch of deserts here, we’ve got a mountain chain here, we’ve got habitat that’s totally inappropriate here; it’s never been appropriate for the past 20 thousand years. So what does that mean for those crocodile populations?” said conservation biologist Matt Shirley, who discovered the West African Slender-snouted crocodile species.

The zoo also has a breeding program for the crocodiles and is receiving assistance from partner organizations in the United States. So far, these breeding efforts have produced around 40 young crocodiles. Some of the young crocodiles are now two years old, and Shirley is negotiating with the government to reintroduce them into the wild—first in Ivory Coast and then elsewhere in West Africa. Today, no more than 1,500 West African Slender-snouted Crocodiles are believed to exist in the wild, scattered across a territory extending from Gambia to Nigeria.