Nowhere In Sight: After Killing 300 People in Africa, Is Gustave the Man-Eating Crocodile Dead?

According to reports from the previous 20 years, 300 people were killed in Africa by Gustave, the man-eating crocodile. There are growing rumors that the enormous crocodile is missing and may even be dead.

An enormous man-eating crocodile by the name of Gustave has terrorized the residents of Lake Tanganyika in Burundi for decades.

The Nile crocodile has become a legend in the region near the Rusizi River because it is thought to have killed over 300 people.

Gustave has been popular for some time, according to crocodile expert Marc Gansuana, and National Geographic has discovered records of his attacks on people in the village dating back to 1987.

However, herpetologist Patrice Faye didn't formally name him until 2001.

With a length of nearly 20 feet and a weight of roughly 2,000 pounds, Gustave is regarded as one of Africa's biggest crocodiles. According to Gansuana, Gustave cannot be confused with any other animal in his territory due to his size.

20 People in One Route

In a 2002 interview with the BBC, Faye claimed that the crocodile's immense size may be to blame for its diet's high proportion of humans.

The crocodile is three times larger than the other crocodiles in Burundi, according to Faye. Because he moves slowly and cannot consume fish and small mammals, unlike other crocodiles in Burundi, there's a possibility that he cannot survive. So he goes after easy-to-catch, slow prey.

Gustave lives on a small river island close to Lake Tanganyika, the second-largest lake in Eastern Africa, where he spends the majority of his time.

Gustave is most dangerous during the mating season when he travels along the Ruzizi River banks, according to Faye.

Faye added that the crocodile makes the long journey to Rumonge and Minago, feeding along the way on fishermen and beachgoers. At the bank, he can devour 10 to 20 people. Between Minago and Kanyosha, as well as Kabezi and Magara, 17 people had been devoured in the year that Faye had followed Gustave on one of his forays.

However, even for a beast, killing 300 people is an impressive accomplishment. Gansuana claims that this number is only an estimate as it was extremely challenging to compile accurate death statistics for an animal of this kind.

He added that in this type of situation, it is challenging to evaluate the dependability of such statistics. The most crucial thing to keep in mind is that he was unmistakably a predator of the Gatumba village.

The locals have hypothesized that Gustave kills for more than just food because he rarely consumes all of his prey.

Gansuana countered that this was untrue because crocodiles never hunt and kills for the sake of it. Crocodiles only need a small amount of food to survive. Except in extremely rare situations, a prey item is not entirely consumed once it has been killed.

Read also: Fishing Gear Slowly Kills Enormous Critically Endangered Crocodile in Belize 

War or Gustave?

Thus, the majority of Gustave's prey-humans or cattle-were discovered almost whole, with only some body parts missing, which may have led some people to believe that Gustave was killing for entertainment purposes rather than for food.

Possibly mistakenly attributed to Gustave, according to Gansuana, were war-related corpses that had washed up by the river.

Even though Gustave has yet to be seen again since 2016, Gansuana claimed that the monster crocodile might still be alive because it is over 75 years old.

It is hard to verify that he is dead because his territory was so large-virtually the entirety of Lake Tanganyika and its tributaries-and no one seems to have boasted about having killed him.

According to MentalFloss, it has never been proven that the enormous Nile crocodile was killed in 2019.

Newsweek speculates that Gustave might simply be hiding out until his next attack.

Related article: 1000-Pound Crocodile, "Man-Eating Dinosaur" Shot Dead in Africa by US Hunter