2.5-metre croc removed from Port Douglas lake

Friday September 12 2014, 3:20pm

A 2.5-metre saltwater crocodile believed to have been responsible for the deaths of several family pets has been trapped and removed from Reef Park lake in Port Douglas. 

Rangers from the Wildlife Control division of the Department of Environment and Heritage Protection (DEHP) removed the croc at about 2:00pm on Friday after it was caught in the floating trap sometime before 10:30am that morning. 

The crocodile will be taken to a DEHP holding facility before being resettled in either a zoo or a croc farm, but will not be released back into the wild. 

The age and sex of the crocodile will not be known until after it is inspected and it may never be known if the croc was responsible for killing two dogs and a cat that belonged to families living next to the lake. 

The croc was previously photographed in October last year and appears to have grown significantly since then. 

Jessie Crampton, the reptile keeper at Hartley's Creek Crocodile Adventures, said the backstory of how the crocodile came to be in the lake, which connects to Dickson Inlet, would depend on its sex. 

"At that size of 2.5 metres, if it's a male it's most likey a young male that might not be fully sexually mature yet and it's probably been pushed out of another river system by an older and bigger male," Mr Crampton said. 

"If that's happened then he's gone looking for a new home with a good easy food source and he's found it in that lake. 

"There's a lot of mating going on at this time of the year so he might have been out looking for a girl."