Spectacled caiman

Spectacled caimans eat many kinds of animals.

They eat bugs, snails, fish, birds and more.

What they eat changes as they grow.

Spectacled caimans are meat eaters that will eat many kinds of animals, from insects, snails, shrimp and crabs to fish, lizards, snakes, turtles, birds and mammals. Scientists have recorded at least 105 different foods in their diet.

What a caiman eats changes as it grows from small to large. Spectacled caimans usually feed at night.

The Animal Diversity Web describes Caiman crocodilus as a carnivorous generalist whose prey shifts as it grows, with at least 105 prey items reported, including insects, snails, shrimp, crabs, fish, lizards, snakes, turtles, birds and mammals; it typically feeds at night, and its ability to sense vibrations in water may help it find prey. In the Peruvian Amazon, Laverty and Dobson (2013) found strong competition for food between spectacled and black caimans (IUCN).

Caimans lie in the sun to warm up.

In the hottest part of the day they stay under water.

They call to each other.

Spectacled caimans spend much of the day lying still. They bask on the shore in the morning and early afternoon and stay under water in the midday heat. Each caiman keeps to its own small home area all year.

They make many kinds of calls. Mothers give warning calls to their young, babies give distress calls, and all caimans make calls that keep the group together. During courtship, a pair may swim together, rub backs, touch snouts, circle each other and blow bubbles.

The IUCN notes that Caiman, with Alligator, shows the most elaborate behaviors known in crocodilians: warning calls from females to their young, distress calls from juveniles and group-cohesion calls from all individuals, while males display with a vertical or arched tail, sub-audible vibrations, barks and visual signals (Ayarzagüena and Castroviejo 2008).

The Animal Diversity Web describes loose-knit groups of mostly solitary animals that keep small home ranges all year, bask from morning to early afternoon and stay submerged at midday, and become territorial during the mating season, when larger, dominant animals mate more often. Courtship includes swimming together, rubbing backs, bellowing, touching snouts, circling and bubble-blowing.

Spectacled caimans are not endangered.

People hunted many for their skins.

Rules on hunting helped them come back.

The spectacled caiman is listed as least concern, and scientists estimate there are millions of them. In the 1970s and 1980s people hunted large numbers of caimans for leather and meat, and some local populations shrank. After rules controlled the hunting and the trade, many populations recovered quickly.

Caimans grow up and breed while still small, and hunters mostly took the biggest males, which helped the species survive. Today caiman skins are still sold around the world under trade rules.

Balaguera-Reina and Velasco assessed Caiman crocodilus as Least Concern (Global; assessed 8 February 2016, published 2019; trend stable), noting a high recovery rate after exploitation, numbers in the millions and local depletion or extirpation in some places. It has been hunted for local food and for trade, mainly leather but also salted and dried meat; heavy trade in the 1970s and 1980s caused local declines, and populations recovered after harvest controls. The IUCN credits its resilience to its small size and young age at first breeding, harvests focused on large males, and its readiness to nest on almost any ground.

Caiman skins make up most of the crocodilian skins traded worldwide: Colombia exported over 6 million C. c. fuscus skins between 1996 and 2015, and Venezuela has run the largest wild harvest program for any crocodilian, with rules that in effect limit hunting to adult males. CITES and national controls appear to have made the trade sustainable; in Colombia's Atlántico Department, more than 15,000 young caimans were returned to wetlands between 2005 and 2009.