Two-meter long reptile lured from Pingtung river

Taipei, Sept. 23 (CNA) An alligator-like reptile, called a spectacled caiman, was recently caught in Pingtung's Wandan Township, after it was lured from the Gaoping River using raw chicken as bait, local authorities said Monday.

The Pingtung County Department of Agriculture said it received a report on the morning of Sept. 17 about a sighting of what looked like crocodile under a bridge near the Lunding community river embankment.

The department said it contacted wildlife removal specialists, who managed to lure the animal to the shoreline, using pieces of raw chicken as bait, an effort that took three hours.

Once the reptile was within range, the contractors shot it with a tranquilizer gun and took it away to be euthanized, the department said in a press statement.

The animal, identified as a male spectacled caiman, was 2.07 meters long and weighed 54 kilograms, the agency said. The reptile was behaving "aggressively" and appeared to be in robust health, the agency said.

Following the caiman's removal, residents of the area said they believed there were "at least five" other caimans still loose in the river system.

Addressing those claims on Monday, Lee Chi-ya (李繼雅), a section chief in the department's animal protection and conservation division, told CNA that although she could not confirm the number of caimans in the river, no further sightings had been reported since Sept. 17.

As for how the non-native species got into the river in the first place, Lee said it could have been an abandoned pet, or one of the multiple caimans from a captive breeding facility that escaped into the Donggang River during extensive flooding in the area on June 12, 2006.

The mouth of the Donggang River is just below the mouth of the Gaoping River, which runs between Kaohsiung and Pingtung County.

According to Lee, caimans are relatively common in Taiwan's pet industry, and do not need to be registered with the government.

The last time a caiman was removed from the wild in Pingtung was in August 2022. In that case, the animal's owner quickly came forward to claim it, Lee said.

A spectacled caiman, a species in the family Alligatoridae that is native to Latin America, gained its name because of the spectacle-like ridge between its eyes.