Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks - The Legend of Gustave, The Killer Crocodile

Episode Date: July 6, 2026

During one of the most violent stretches in it's country's history, Burundi was terrorized by a massive Nile crocodile that was said to be responsible for the deaths of 300 people. A small team came together and the hunt began. Watch here: https://youtu.be/OL1Etn-qunI ~ Rocket Money - Let Rocket Money help you find and cancel unwanted subscriptions, monitor your spending, and lower your bills—join at https://rocketmoney.com/CLAW. Ollie Pet Food - Ollie. Feed the Obsession. Go to https://ollie.com/tooth and use code tooth to get 70% off your first box! LMNT - Get a free 8-count Sample Pack of LMNT's most popular drink mix flavors with any purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/tooth. Quince - Make your summer wardrobe easier—go to https://quince.com/tooth for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada. Smalls - For a limited time, get 60% off your first order, plus free shipping and free treats for life, when you head to https://Smalls.com/TOOTH. ~ To advertise on the show, contact us! Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/c/toothandclawpodcast ~~ Tooth & Claw is brought to you by QCODE. Support the show and get access to an extensive library of exclusive episodes like this by supporting the show on Patreon or joining the Grizzly Club on Apple Podcasts. For the latest updates on the show and all things wildlife, follow us at toothandclawpod.com and social:  Instagram: @ToothandClawPodcast Twitter: @ToothandClawPod Wes: @GrizKid Jeff: @jefe_larson Mike: @mikey3ds Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello everybody and welcome back to a wonderful day inside of the wonderful podcast, Tooth and Claw. And we have our wonderful wildlife biologist, Wes Larson, with us. How are you doing today, Wes? I'm good. I'm good. It's late June. Things are wonderful. That's wonderful. And I'm Wes's little brother, Jeff, and I've been doing good, too.

And we got Mike Smith with us. I saw a disclosure day yesterday. Oh, what'd you think? They disclosed, spoiler, they disclosed some information at the end. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Who did?

The actors, the people. Oh, okay. Yeah, don't spoil it, actually. Yeah. That was close. Mike, you saw Masters of the Universe? I sure did. I sure did.

How was that? It was exactly what I thought it was going to be. Mike was saying it need to be a little longer. Holy cow. Why was that movie like three hours long? That didn't need to be the case. Yeah, that's too long for that movie. The jokes landed at about a 5% rate.

Yeah, that is about what I'd expect. It wasn't super great, but, you know, at a certain point, you just have to realize that movie maybe isn't made for you quite. What was that movie a while ago where there was someone online that said, like, there wasn't a single joke in the movie? and it was like a really serious movie and that was their big complaint I feel like it was like the Batman or Sindler's List or something

Yeah and they're like oh this movie sucked There wasn't a single joke Schindler's list like if you put a joke In that movie it could really hit you know Like you could put a good joke That's a high risk high reward kind of joke My main thing with Disclosure Day is like Steven Spielberg is maybe

The best example of a drug director using visual effects to their benefit and just creating works of art with T-Rex, sharks, all that, you know? It's like, his AI animals suck. Yeah, that killed me. Just the trailer seeing the deer, I was like, I can't. I don't think I'm going to like this. Every single hair is, like, perfect, and it's, like, lit up all weird.

And, I don't know, like, you're supposed to be good at this, dude. Did he use AI, or was it? Yeah. He used AI? Or I don't know what the difference of AI and CG is. AI is like an artist doesn't make it, a computer makes it. CG and a like CG artist creates it. Spielberg's been using AI since forever ago.

That Haley Joel Osman. He might be my goat. I've been thinking about it lately. I think it's Spielberg or Ridley Scott, but I think it's Spielberg. Jeff is more of a Tony Scott than a Ridley guy. I was going to ask you guys that actually. Because I started watching DejaVu the other night. And I was like, you know, Tony Scott has some movies that have some, they have some juice.

Like, he's got some good movies. True romance, Crimson Tide. Top Gun. So my question for you was going to be, and it sounds like Jeff, I don't even have to add the extra. I don't know if Mike's serious about that or not. I'm not sure if I am either. I was going to say, if you could take either all of Ridley Scott's. movies or Tony Scott's movies and Quentin Tarantino's movies, who would you pick?

Ridley, by a mile. Me too. Very comfortably and easily for me. Yeah. I think I'd take Tony and Quentin. Quentin. Yeah. All right.

Good question, Les. Thanks. Wow. When'd you come up with that one? Because, you know, they both did true romance together. And then... Sure. It just made me think, like, wow, Tony Scott and Ridley Scott are so different.

But Tony Scott has some bangers. It's a fact. Unstoppable. Unstoppable is a good film. He's dead, right? He did. He jumped from off of a bridge due to, well, who I don't want to psychoanalyze, but that's a really interesting medical sorted history. Like misprescribed drugs and dosages and stuff.

I thought you're talking about jumping off the bridge. That seems pretty clear. Not a complicated. Circumstrived. diagnosis there, but not to make light of it, but yeah. But we did. We lost a legend, a living legend, you know. Well, speaking of legends, Mike, you did our episode today?

Yes, sir. And you, oh man, that was such an appropriate segue, Jeff, in so many ways. Because I assume that the legend you're referring to wasn't me. It was the subject of today's episode, right? It's a lot of things. You were in there. You're a legend. You're becoming one.

Thank you. I'm an aspiring legend, a legend in training. I'm like a Padawan. I need one of those little rat tail braids that dangles over my shoulder. Watch out for Anakin. I wanted to start this episode in a way that would really get West going, though. Oh. And stop me when you know who this quote is attributed to.

Either one of you. Quote, in some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. Stop. Gandalf. Close. History became legend. Legend became myth. Oh, two and a half thousand years.

Gadro. Galadriel. Hel them out. Wes. Gatrel. Gatrol. She's got like a thick butt on Instagram. That was one part.

You know Galadriel had it going on though Caked up Jeff's answer was one part impressive One part Really disappointing You did great That was actually I was expecting West to swoop in quick Jeff's better at quotes than I am

And he always has been Like he's good at remembering that kind of stuff I didn't know that. What do you mean? I just, I, I, I didn't think I was good at quotes. You are. You're better at, like, at remembering sayings and quotes than I am. Wes, what movie is this one from?

But they will remember the Titans. Remember the Titans. Don't forget the Titans. Someone sent me this clip that was like, this guy being like, guess the movie. And then it's Richard Hammond or Dr. Hammond being like, welcome to Jurassic Park. Well, that could be any number of Jurassic Park movies. Okay.

So now that we got Wes all hot underneath the collar, I did actually think about you a lot while preparing this episode, Wes, because there was a time on this very podcast when you talked about all those bugs you used to eat, right? and you gave us a number that truly shocked me. You said up to hundreds per day you would eat bugs. And that was like unbelievable, but not to the point where it was just like beyond belief, you know? I could see a world a day in which that was possible for you. And I don't know. Maybe it was that many. Maybe you were eating hundreds of bugs per day and I just don't know ball like that.

Joey Chesnett of bugs over here. Yeah. Bugs are small. You can pack in a lot of bugs. Right. They're hard to catch that. Like an ant is a bug. You just put like a straw in an ant hill.

Yeah. Yeah, that's what made you the goat is you could catch him so well. I could catch him and I could eat him. Well, like a lot of monster stories, it can be hard to figure out what's all the way true and what's maybe a little embellished with the subject of today's episode. But even if the very lowest estimates of how many people he can. killed her to be believed, there's one Nile crocodile that solidified himself as one of the deadliest individual animals ever. Wow. But before we can get into his legend, we need to set the historical stage. Since the state of the world for both when and where this crocodile lived made for a perfect

storm that vaulted him into near mythological status to this day. And who knows? Maybe everything that's been said about him actually is true. All these numbers people toss around could be accurate and we don't even need to try to explain the myth away. But maybe we can deliberate by the time we finish the episode. But first, let's talk about the Barundi Civil War. And I'm going to get through this part pretty quickly. So forgive me if I eschew any nuance that's due to what I'm sure is like a very complicated political situation. But on July 1st, 1962, Burundi, and if you want to know where Barundi is, it's East

Africa nestled between the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda up to the north, Kenya to the east. So like, what if I didn't want to know where it was? Spoiler alert. Hold on. Put a spoiler alert in there, Bill. Isn't it pretty close to like all the big lakes too, like Lake Victoria and stuff? Very close to Victoria. And right alongside, that's actually a good shout because we'll get to the name of the lake pretty soon here, Tanganyika, which is where a lot of the story will be taking place. But landlocked. locked, central eastern Central Africa. On July 1st, 1962,

Burundi gained its independence from Belgium, thus ending decades of European colonial administration and beginning a long and tumultuous period of ethnic conflict. 30 years later in 1993, Wes. What month? Are we pre-JP or post-JP? I should have done a better job here. It's all right.

That's year one, though. That's year one. In 1993, 30 years after gaining its independence, the leader of the Hutu-dominated Front for Democracy won the first democratic election for the country of Burundi. But after only three months in office, he was assassinated in a failed military coup. The country fell into an incredibly violent civil war that lasted until 2005 and claimed the lives of some 300,000 Burundi citizens. In those years, 1993 to 2005, that'll be important to keep in mind. Okay. In fact, Jeff, let's do a quick.

Was Jeff paying attention? Shit. What years did the Barundi Civil War take place? 1994 to 1995. So close. I can do it. West, would you? 93 to 2005.

Perfect. And that guy was in power for three months. Three months. He had a good run. Good run there. Yeah. Who is our president? Was it Polk?

Or no, Garfield was just like smoked? the U.S. president after just like a couple of weeks or something. Was he killed? Yeah. There's one president who won and then he didn't wear a jacket and it was like rained on him. And he said, I don't need a jacket. And he was so excited to win president. And then he like got sick from getting rained on and died.

What of our presidents? Yeah. Huh. Speaking of presidents of the United States, did you know that Shadow the head? Hedgehog once tried to assassinate the president, I guess. That's something I learned recently. I didn't know that. Who shadow the hedgehog?

Like a villain slash hero. He's like one of the ones that is bad, but then becomes good. He's in Sonic 3. Is that true? The movie. Yeah. Oh, the movie. Sure.

Okay. Movies are good. The video game. That was Knuckles. Sonic and Knuckles. Yeah. Have you guys seen those movies? It's not the first one.

They're kind of fun. It's all right. I like the original Sonic more with the weird teeth. Yeah. Me too. Just to finish this little historical section off real quick, as if nature were a reflection of the humans inhabiting it, this decade of turmoil and death lined up nearly perfectly

with what some describe as one of the single most prolific, quote, serial killers that the animal kingdom has ever produced. So the sources I'm going to cite pretty heavily from here on are, a PBS documentary called Capturing the Killer Croc, really good stuff. There is a really succinctly organized YouTube video from a channel called DINZO that I found to be very useful. So check that out if you're looking to have like some visual aids to go along with the story. But I did a lot more than just that guy. Trust me. Great.

So don't just like leave here and go there. And then also a really nice little podcast called Goolish Tendencies had an episode. called Gustav the Killer Croc. And again, that was just like a very useful aid in, you know, laying out the framework for this episode. So shout out those women over at Goulish Tendencies. But also, listen to us. Don't listen to him. Very cool at all, but.

But also just listen to this. Right. The year was 1987, Wes. Yeah, six years pre-JP. That was the year when the first wanted post, went up in western Barundi villages lining the northern coast of Lake Tonganika. The word spread,

disappearances increased, and it wasn't long until the whispers of a giant crocodile instilled fear in anyone who lived close to that stretch of the Rossizi River that it called home. Ten years later, 1997. That would be. That's when the lost world came out. You think you could say the word Tyrannosaurus Rex

in 87, Wes? In 87? Yeah, for sure. Sure. Whoa. I was four years old. So I was already like fully dinosaur pilled by that point. That would be a big pill.

Yeah. Hopefully not a suppository, right, Les? Yeah. Oh boy. How can, is that what we're talking when someone is like red-pilled or blue-pilled? That's like an oral pill, right? Or is it a subpoena? I believe so.

I don't think they really matters too much. All right. Okay. Lost World has like the best dinosaur. or CG of any movie ever. Better than Jurassic Park even. It's so good. Lost World's overlooked.

Like, that's a good movie. San Diego sequence at the end is real fun. The whole thing is great, in my opinion. Okay, so 10 years later, a French naturalist named Patrice Faye found himself investigating the scene, interviewing a fisherman about the crocodile that had killed his brother.

Nothing about this interview struck Patrice as being all that unusual, though. Sure, the crocodile is huge. maybe up to 20 feet long, but that wasn't totally unheard of. And it was probably just the exaggeration of a grieving and frightened brother. But as the interview was ending, the fisherman included one peculiar detail. You know how like sometimes when you like someone says something and you cock your head to the side? Yeah.

My dog does that all the time. That's probably what Patrice was doing. What way do you cock your head when you hear something interesting? To the right. I go left. I don't know, actually. I go left. Oh, left is tough for me.

My neck doesn't like it. No, right, it's hard for me. That's weird. I think I'm, I buy cock. You don't have a dominant side of the neck. For cocking now. Yeah. Okay.

So anyway, this strange detail that Patrice heard was that the crocodile had indeed killed his brother, but it hadn't eaten him. What the heck? Jeff? Yeah. That's like buying a Costco cake and then throwing it away without eating.

It wasn't that good. It looked good. It was like buying a whole... I'm proud of you for doing it. That was the right decision. It shouldn't have been so wasteful though. I feel bad about that. Sure.

I did that recently. I did that last week. I bought a Costco cheesecake. Yeah. I bought a $25. Pistachio Costco cheesecake. That's what I bought too. Really?

That's exactly what I did. We could have had two slices. I gave the rest of mind to the pigs. That is bizarre. Okay. I did this a week ago. I did it two weeks ago. Wow.

No, you know what? It was two weeks ago because it was the day Jesse left. That's nuts. I can't. This is more unbelievable than the story I'm about to tell. The pigs ate the rest of mind. We should tell this story. Okay.

Anyway. So, Wes, that doesn't really make a whole lot of biological sense, right? Usually a crocodile kills and then eats, right? Almost always. Generally, yes. Generally. Yeah. Simply killing without eating would be, especially for a crocodile of this size,

kind of a waste of energy. Yes. Especially if it's not like cashing it somewhere. Right. So at first, Patrice dismissed the story as maybe just, just an oddity or a misunderstanding, and probably not even true, until he interviewed the witness of another crocodile killing not long after, who told a similar story with the same ending. He had seen a huge crocodile kill a human, but leave before eating them.

And then he aired the same thing from another witness, and then another, and then another, until Patrice was certain that at the very least he had uncovered a mystery that was worth investigating. How do you say, what the heck in French? Sacrebleau. Sacrebleau. Yeah, sure that works. So with the help of National Geographic, Patrice began traveling the length of the Rusezi River and the coast of Lake Tanganyika, asking after anyone who had any information to share about these strange deaths or the so-called monster crocodile,

who it sounded like at this point was just killing for sport. The story more or less was always the same. A massive crocodile with three bullet wounds along his back, a distinct bone feature protruding from the back of his head, and a scar on its shoulder from where a hunter had tried and felt. failed to kill him with a spear would slay its prey and then leave without eating it. Wow. That's cool. See, that's what, if Spielberg did a crocodile in his movies, he wouldn't have any scars or any bullet holes.

He'd just have it. Perfectly lit. Maybe part of why it's not eating these people is they, it's a crocodile. So they don't gator roll, right, Wes? No, they, they do. Why would it be a gator roll if they're a crocodile? We call it a gator roll, but like they still spin and tear off chunks of meat. They learned it from alligators.

No, it's just something in their natural behavior. But they don't call it gator rolling. That's just something we call it in the U.S. I'm glad you're theorizing, Jeff. That's very apropos for today's episode. Keep doing that. Please. I distinctly remember when I first got a credit card and I started looking at my balances, not knowing what to think.

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Join at RocketMoney.com slash claw. That's rocketmoney.com slash claw. Rocketmoney.com slash claw. Eventually they ran into a young man named Hatungi Mana Outifax, who at 13 years old had lost his leg to a crocodile whose physical description matched the crocodile that Patrice had at this point begun calling Gustav. And I tried so hard to figure out why he settled on the name Gustav, and I just couldn't find anything. So here we are, Gustav. Okay, keep your secrets, Patrice. Hatungi Mana began to tell a strange story. One day he and his friends went for a swim in the Resee River.

He was later told that people on the shore were shouting, Crocodile, but he didn't hear them, so when Gustav gently chomped down on his leg from behind, he thought it was just one of his friends messing with him. He whipped around, maybe smiling, ready to fight back, but instead of a friend, he saw what he described as something huge, something old. Quote, it was like he was escorting me. He didn't attack, maybe because the fishermen were beating on the water.

I turned to look at him and our eyes met. My leg was crushed and some of the calf muscle was torn off. I was almost losing my mind because of the pain, end quote. And then for some reason, Gustav let him go and disappeared beneath the muddy waters of the river as Hattungamana pulled his way to safety. So that's odd. Yeah. You know? When you bite someone, Wes, you're, it's all or nothing, you know?

When I do or when Gustav does. If you were a crocodile, you would have a crocodile, you would have. Apparently not. You would have. Okay. Well, so maybe this is a good time to like go into crocodile behavior because usually what would happen if this was a prey item for Gustav probably would have taken them underwater to drown him. Yes. So what often happens with them is they'll pull their prey underwater, drown it, and then they use the death roll to pull chunks off of it to feed.

The death roll isn't generally like they're, as far as I know, like they're. strategy for killing stuff necessarily. But yeah, drowning is the main way that they kill their prey. I forgot with Crocs, it's death row for gators, it's gator roll. Yeah. Yeah. Still, I'm impressed, though. You're firing on all cylinders.

It's early. You wanted to do this at 3 a.m. I just, you guys never, I try so hard. I bend over backwards. I always have a haircut. I would have done it, but I needed Daniel to. set this stuff up and I didn't make her do it at 5 a.m. Someday we're gonna...

It would have been funny to explain to her. I was trying. I was like, hey, I might need you to set this up at 5 a.m. And she's like, what? Was she like suck lay blue? She would have done it, but I was just like, hey, boys, let's push it back a little. Okay.

In another interview in a nearby village, a fisherman showed Patrice's huge stomach scars, claiming that he was nearly gutted by this crocodile, but that Gustav didn't seem particularly intent on killing him, or at least not on eating him. Having picked up on the trend of leaving his victims uneaten, Patrice was no longer surprised when he would receive a call about Gustav, about another lifeless body left intact on the banks of the river. Wow.

What did surprise Patrice were the claims that eyewitnesses of Gustav would make. He was supposedly so large, violent, and frightening that he became something more mythological than real in the minds of the locals. Eyewitness accounts of him would exaggerate his size. Sometimes they would claim he was over 40

feet long. It's pretty just spell that one right now. It's not true. They don't use feet though so you can't blame them. Maybe they meant 40 meters long. That's much less true. Yeah.

they would claim that his scales or his scoots is that how you pronounce that? Yeah. They would claim that they were red and that he had long grassy patches sprouting from his skin. Also not true. Yeah, but it's kind of fun to imagine

like a red crocodile. 40 meters long. Oh my gosh. Algae, sure. They would exaggerate his behavior or maybe not. They would claim that he would charge fearlessly at large crowds of people

or even attack motorized boats. And that's a claim that is not wholly without merit. Yeah. But most shocking of all was Gustav's supposed kill count, and we'll get to that one soon. But Patrice had known for a while that the next step had to be seeing Gustav for himself. Is it more or less than Wes with bugs?

That's so much less. It's insane. What do you think bugs used to call Wes? Gustav There's little wanted posters everywhere My face on him They're like he had grass growing out of his head Patrice had known for a while

That the next step had to be seeing Gustav for himself But the fact that he hadn't yet Was not for lack of trying The Resee River is 73 miles long With tons and tons of crocodiles dotting its waters Incredibly muddy Littered with huge swaths of reeds in tall grass and had an ever-changing shoreline that shifted with the season.

It was like the proverbial needle in the haystack. You know, it's like even in a geographical range, you're much smaller than this. It's really, really difficult to pinpoint and find one specific crock. But he's been there for a few weeks. Much longer than that even at this point now. I mean, if I'm there for months, I'm finding a needle in a haystack. You think? I would give up pretty quick, I think.

I mean, I'm saying if you tried for months. If you didn't give up. Yeah, I think in months I could find a needle at a haystack. How big is a haystack? Like those big wheels, circles? Is that what? Like a round bail? Yeah.

Yeah, you probably could. I wonder how long do you think it would take? Days. I mean, it could just take minutes if you got really lucky. I think I'd get the needle in 24 hours. If I was motivated. Just saying, maybe. it's even harder than a needle in a haystack is my point sure like a needle in a thousand haystacks

in a hay field field yeah maybe it's like you know how every planet in star wars is just like one ecosystem yeah like khorasanta city or andor is just a one big forest yeah maybe the planet is like the hay planet and then there's one needle there yeah they had the hay planet in andor uh where were we here. He hasn't seen Gustav. Here we go. Here's how long he's been searching, Jeff. Two years. After two years of constant searching and seemingly always being one step behind, Patrice began to think that maybe Gustav wasn't just like a legend, but was actually just the result of overactive imaginations. But then one day he saw something so large that at first his eyes almost passed right over it since it didn't

register in his brain that it could be a crocodile. At a glimpse, it looked more to him like a huge tree trunk that had floated down the river and settled on a sandbank. But he did a double take. What he was looking at was actually one of the largest Nile crocodiles he or anyone else would ever see. To confirm its identity, Patrice quickly scanned its body to see if it had the scars he had been told it would have. And sure enough, along the crock's back were the three bullet wounds and a deep discolored

scar on his shoulder. Still shaking from the sight, Patrice eyeballed its size and estimated that Gustav measured somewhere around 20 feet long and weighed a staggering 2,000 pounds. It's a lot of pounds. Dude, if you were British, you'd be rich. Yeah, 2,000 pounds. Do they still use pounds? I don't know.

I think they use euros, right? No. Because they brexited. No, they, because they, that was Brexit. They, I think they use pounds. They're back on pounds? Yeah. Why not kilos?

Are they stupid? 20 feet long. is close to the length of a bus. Which kind of bus? I think it's about 80% of a bus for length. Buses are about like 25 feet. Like 25 to 30 feet. I don't think so.

You want to check that? You need to know this. You look that up, Jeff. We'll keep going. That is important to know. I'm not looking at. I'll look it up. The next important observation to make would be Gustav's teeth.

since size alone isn't always the most accurate way to determine a crocodile's age. Based on Patrice's past experience, a crocodile that size would have to be close to a hundred years old. But when he finally got close enough to get a good look inside Gustav's mouth, he saw that his teeth were a near perfect condition. Later in the PBS documentary that I referenced earlier, called Capturing the Killer Croc, scientist Alison Leslie explained that throughout their life,

crocodiles lose their teeth, and then replace them, but at diminishing returns. So older crocodiles, they'll have fewer teeth that are a little more weathered and worn down. So Gustav's teeth being in pristine condition was another curiosity to add to the swiftly growing list of things that made him unusual. So he's huge enough to be 100 years old, but his teeth are in perfect enough condition. Now the new estimate for his age was closer to 60 years old, maybe, at oldest. most likely born sometime in the 1940s. While he acknowledged that the killings needed to be stopped by any means necessary,

Patrice concluded that it would be a shame for such an exceptional specimen to be killed before he could be properly studied. So we approached the Baruni Minister of Environment with his reasoning and a plan. The minister agreed on the condition that he either make it happen in 60 days or the project to capture Gustav would need to be abandoned due to the escalating political tension. It's it. That's pretty generous, honestly. If this crocodile is killing people that frequently, most leaders would be like, no, we're killing it. I think, well, part of the problem is that even though people had tried, nobody could at this point.

Sure. So, like, even if they were to find him, they were killing him is easier said than none, I guess. It feels to me, like, what more do you learn from it alive than dead? Yeah, that's a good point. Mm. Yeah. Behavior. Patrice had, we're going to get into some Patrice stuff later on.

So maybe this isn't, I don't, we'll get there. This guy, uh, yeah. In fact, I was hesitant to even like really get into this guy, but I feel like we need to by the end. Yeah. School bus is 35 to 45 feet. So I said 40 feet. That's right in the middle of that. Typical long school bus.

Jeff was thinking of the buses he used to ride. Maybe. I always liked those short buses are so aesthetically pleasing to me. I like a squat little bus, you know. Yeah. Patrice immediately set to work trying to capture Gustav, designing a huge steel cage custom made to fit the crock. He then called in a team of specialists and, oh man, this is going to get Jeff.

I love getting a team together. It's the best part of any movie is assembling the team, you know. including the aforementioned South African scientist Allison Leslie and a Tunisian expert named Mark Gonswana, both of whom had invaluable years of experience with crocodiles. And this Mark guy, he ran a farm, or I don't know exactly what you would call it in Tunisia, but he just had hundreds of Nile crocodiles. It was just dealing with them day and day out. Yeah, a farm. Yeah. Farm.

But even with all their combined experience, this All-Star team wasn't feeling all that confident on account of the fact that. Gustav, unusual crock that he was, refused to stick to a single territory, instead opting to travel long stretches on his own. And also that he was huge and was now just killing people at unheard of rates. They're just like, this is going to be a tough task here. He had killed three people in a week. Each victim miles from each other. He had eaten none of them. Three humans in a week. That's, I mean, we'll get into some facts really soon. Crocodiles, even if he was eating them, they're not needing to eat that frequently. But in an interview with BBC in 2002, Patrice reported that Gustav would regularly patrol the

20-mile stretch of water between Ramon Gay and Monago, eating fishermen and bathers on route as he moved unpredictably up and down the coast of the muddy shorelines. Quote, he can eat 10, 15, or 20 people along the bank. One year I followed the path he took for one of his forays and 17 people had been eaten between Kenyosha and Manago and Cabezzi and Magara. So one year, 17 people. He would appear wherever he felt like appearing whenever he felt like it, with the team always showing up right when Gustav was said to have left an area.

And so they started just pulling out all the stops in order to spot Gustav. And I was so delighted in this documentary to see that they got in a hot air balloon, which is just my favorite vehicle for anyone to get into for like practical purposes, you know. They, like, see a log and turn the whole thing around to go, like, make sure, and it's just a log still. Yeah, it takes like a half hour to turn it around. Sandbags. Can you go that direction? Nope.

This goes up and down. We can go up. We can go down. Okay. So the concern at this point, though, is that in the past, Gustav would often disappear for months. at a time after one of these killing sprees. And with the 60-day hard limit that they had, this was time that they no longer had to spare.

Okay. We're going to get into some facts now. And since this is our first episode about Nile Crocodiles, this is going to be your standard slate of the basics, what we need to know about them. So their size. And this is just like I'm doing averages here so we can kind of compare and contrast

just how special and unique Gustav was compared to it. But the average, adult male Nile crocodile often reaches lengths between 12 and 15 feet long and will weigh anywhere from 500 to 1,500 pounds. That's how much a bus weighs. That's not true. So Gustav was 20 feet long and weighed around 2,000 pounds, pretty exceptionally larger than the average.

And Nile crocodiles, I believe, are the second largest crocodilians in the world after saltwater crocodiles. They're also sexually dimorphics. Surprise, Wes, surprise, everything is. But which ones are bigger? Females are males. Males are 30% smaller on average. Whoa.

Okay, what do they look like? We're getting real standard basic here, but they're spotted and striped with a dark bronze and olive-colored back. And on their undercarriage, their underside is kind of like a dingy yellow color. Undercarriage. In case you're ever wondering if you're seeing Nile Crocodiles undercarriage. Nether regions. Yeah, they're ventral side. Crocodiles, Wes.

Yeah. Their bite, their teeth. How do they work? They're for grabbing, grabbing, and tearing. But they're not, they don't chew with their teeth. So like long, sharp conical teeth. So, you know, they grab and then they go back and forth to tear. But that's really all they're good for them.

And they just swallow big chunks, right? Big old chunks. Is that what you're looking for? Yeah, I am looking for that. I was just thinking of all the different possible food items for crocodiles to eat all of a sudden. I was thinking of that tea. Yeah. Like, you know how you take a fork and you kind of do a death roll with spaghetti?

That's true. Is that what they're doing? No. They're not twisting something. But they don't. Like, have we ever seen one eat spaghetti, I guess, is the first question. No, I don't think so. See?

That's science right there. You ask a question, hypothetical. What was the length of that one? Spaghetti noodle? Two miles. Two miles. They could probably roll that thing up so fast. Yeah.

That'd be so fun. We need to... What are scientists even doing? Okay. Age. In the wild, Nile crocodiles live for about 45 years on average, but can live up to 80 years or longer while in captivity. So again, Gustav, probably around 60 years old, pretty exceptional.

We don't have like a hard and fast. We don't know for sure, but like maybe more fit or capable crocodiles are going to prolong that lifespan, a little longer than that average 45 years. Where do they live? Their range. So they're native to freshwater habitats in Africa, widely distributed in sub-Saharan Africa. And I realized while preparing this episode, as many times as I've heard, heard you say that. I didn't know what that meant, Wes. What does that mean exactly?

South of the Sahara Desert. So basically anywhere not northern Africa. Yeah, more or less. I mean, Africa obviously is a very diverse continent with so many different types of habitat and whatnot. But there is kind of this big division between the northern third of the continent and the rest, where that northern third is all mostly arid, extremely arid desert. And then, and the rest has a lot more variety. Right. And we say that because one person wrote in and said, you shouldn't just say Africa.

It's been more than one. We definitely have generalized Africa in the past, and it's something that we can't do better with. Yes. So sub-Saharan Africa, and they are present in 26 countries. So really is basically everything but that northern Sahara portion of Africa,

as West just explained. I did it again, though. I explained it again. Do they overlap with saltwater crocodiles at all? No. No. Any more questions? No.

Keep talking with you. I just thought you'd have a follow-up. Like, what if they did, though? This would be my next question. That's interesting, I guess. Then they would probably compete with them at a pretty high level. So their diet. adult nile crocodiles are the apex predator for their range and are ambush hunters and they'll eat pretty much anything they can overpower including fish birds zebras antelope sometimes even the occasional buffalo very occasionally and humans obviously for the intents and purposes of this episode here's something that i found really interesting about nile crocodile stomach biology i guess is how i'll put it but they have an ecto-throatal

metabolic metabolism and they don't really need to eat all that often but when they do they can eat up to half of their body weight at a time what's really interesting about that though is according to hushemeyer's uh hooshermeyer's crocodiles biology and husbandry their stomachs aren't much larger than a basketball so i don't where's it all going does it expand it has to just expand an insane amount yeah otherwise like i don't know quite or maybe it's one of those like giant basketballs like a gimmick basketball like when they happen to parade maybe hoosh sir meyer didn't really understand basket or maybe maybe it's really just pointing to like houses and being like that's about the size of a basketball right yeah you know how like when you see a

basketball really close up it looks big but when you see a stomachs from a crocodile like really far away it looks small. Maybe he just has no concept of perspective. I think that's safe to assume. That's not funny. Okay. So they can swim up to 22 miles an hour and run up to nine miles an hour on land. So they're like pretty quick.

It's a short little burst on land, enough to be dangerous. But water is really where they're, um, you know, causing some damage. Yeah. I think people hear that and they think like, oh, so I could outrun one. But it's like if a crocodile suddenly burst, you know, and is running after you on land, there's a very good chance you're going to fall over. And you're going to be so scared.

And a lot of people do. And you got to kind of run backwards at first. Normally. Right. You're not like in starting blocks. No. There's, yeah. So their social behavior.

Nile crocodiles are relatively social amongst themselves and share basking spots and large food sources. The hierarchy is determined by size, so the largest male will have first access to the food and the best basking spots, which is real just like alpha behavior, you know? Sure. It's kind of fun just to think of like a huge. Allison in the documentary when she was looking at Gustav, she was just like, oh, he is fat. He is so fat.

He can just like envision a fat crocodile like just lumbering up to the best, best, best. And kicking spot and kicking everyone else out. Right. As like a beefy boy, it'd be nice going to the pool and just be in like, choose whatever spot someone's in and be like, hey, get out of here. Right. Another thing I found kind of fun about their parental behavior is both mother and father are known to guard their nests until the eggs hatch.

And if their babies are having a hard time getting out of their shell, the mother and maybe the father, I think it's just the mother. they'll put the eggs in their mouth and roll them gently around with their tongue and on the roof of their mouth to help crack the egg a little bit for the babies to emerge a little easier, which I thought was kind of fun. That's cool. It'd be scary as a baby. It'd be like, oh, no, she's eating me. Yeah, I'm about to get it.

Dude, that is a danger. They eat each other a lot, it turns out. There's cannibalism is rife in Nile Crocodile culture. Human deaths caused by Nile Crocs. So it's hard to know exactly because a lot of a time. attacks go unreported, but it's estimated that they kill hundreds, possibly thousands of people each year, and that they're responsible for more human deaths than all other crocodilians combined, which I think Wes has alluded to in the past. Yeah, it's crazy the range that you read. You hear

numbers like $520,000, which is just unreal. But the thing is, is a lot of people in their range just go missing and we don't know if they drowned or if they were eaten by a crocodile and a lot of them were probably eaten by crocodiles like these are this is one of the few animals in the world that sees us as prey and it's pretty good at like eating us so I I tend to believe that it is in the thousands that's an important thing to keep in mind too moving forward is what you just mentioned is these disappearances that are unexplained possibly crocodile possibly from other factors but If you were to say, like, what's the most dangerous large animal in Africa? It is without a doubt, Nile Crocodiles.

One last fact before we get back to our story. And this is just like a bonus amateur observation. So as all great science does, I began with a hypothesis. And I was like, you know what? Most humans are right-handed. I bet most crocodiles death roll to the right. You know? So I found six videos of Crocodiles' death.

rolling. Three of them they rolled to the right, three of them they rolled to the left. Ooh. So I don't... Disproved your hypothesis. I'm not jumping to any conclusions, but, you know. Yeah, you need a bigger data set. Yeah. But it is an interesting question, you know?

It seems like, I don't know what it seems like. Maybe it's depending on the hemisphere they're in. Right. Like the Coriolis effect, you know? Mm-hmm. That's science. As you all know, I adopted a dog about five or six months ago, and he is a tripod.

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with any purchase at drink element.com slash tooth. Find your favorite flavor or share with a friend. Okay, let's get back to Gustav. How about? You ready for that, Jeff? Yes. During their search, Patrice and the team heard something that really just dumbfounded them. As plans for building the cage were well underway, a park ranger claimed that he had seen Gustav killing a hippopotamus. And it's probably not what you're thinking.

Like, probably just like a tiny baby hippo or something like that. No, this was a fully grown adult hippo. Yeah, not typically pray for them. Usually encounters with hippos and with crocodiles being pretty easily dispatched. These hippos just have size and strength and speed. Every advantage over these crocodiles, usually, but not Gustav. He had attacked one, which was already hurt something pretty unheard of, and then it actually won the fight.

The team was left to ask what exactly had made him this way, and if their 30-foot-long steel cage would even be enough to contain them if they did find them at this point. A few theories to try and explain Gustav have since been offered up. Like most crocodiles in the region, he was probably born in the lower section of the Rossesia River where the slow water moving waters spread out into marshlands and shallow banks. Anything that entered the water upstream would eventually wind its way down through to this stretch of the river. And as we covered at the beginning, the history of this part of Africa might help us understand what sort of interesting things might have been floating down towards these crocodiles.

In 1972, when Gustav had been about, he would have been about 30 years old or so, a political uprising in the South triggered a violent retaliation from the government, and the army began removing anyone they deemed capable of organizing any further attempts at resistance. In just a few months' time, this genocide saw between 100 and 200,000 people killed, and as awful as it is to consider, the river offered an easy way to dispose of these bodies. So they would be disposed of upstream. They would float down towards all of these crocodiles living kind of in this delta area where the river, the Resee River met Lake Tanganyika. And many of these bodies ended up drifting right through Gustav's territory.

And this is where one theory as to why he killed without eating was proffered up by Patrice. Years of feeding on human remains without having to really hunt might have dulled his instinct to kill in order to eat. But you're probably already poking holes in this theory, I imagine. Thousands of other crocodiles are also living right here alongside Gustav. So why weren't they all huge and killing wantonly as well? You know? Yes. Another thing to consider is that by the time Gustav started his thing of killing but not eating,

he would have already been in at least his mid-40s. The late 1980s he would have been about 40, maybe a little older. So why did he start killing and not eating so late in life? Some more theories popped up, and I'm going to be pretty heavily quoting that Dino YouTube video. I referenced earlier just to keep things on track, keep it succinct. But the first theory as to why Gustav would kill but not eat his victims

is called the herpetologist's view. Gustav eventually grew to be nearly 20 feet long and weighed around 2,000 pounds. But of course, he wasn't always that big. He didn't just come out of the womb, 20 feet long, right? You have to imagine. I don't know. With Gustav, it seems like he's not a very typical crocodile. They also don't come out of the womb.

That's true. Whatever. Eggs and wombs. It's like, whatever, Wes. So, some important biology for Nile Crocodiles we have to consider here is how they grow. In the first 10 years, a male Nile crocodile goes from one foot long to about eight feet long. Then between years 10 and 20, they grow another 50% or so until they're around 11 or 12 feet long. Between 20 and 30, growth.

slows down drastically and the average male Nile Crock will top out at around 15 feet long. After that, they'll grow maybe an inch or two per decade, if that, until they reach full skeletal maturity is what they call it much later in life. And for a long time, we actually thought that Crockdiles, Nile Crocodiles, I don't know why that's so freaking hard to say for me. Nile Crocodile. It rhymes. It's like poetry. We thought that they were indeterminate growers that they literally just never stopped growing kind of like lobsters. That's since been disproven, but it does take a very long time until they reach that skeletal maturity.

So for the first 30 or so years of his life, until around the time the human killings began, Gustav was probably still within that average size range for a Nile crocodile and could thus sustain himself the way any other of his species would. A diet of fish and other unfortunate animals drinking from the side of the river, or maybe the occasional other crocodile. The herpetologist theory goes, though, that by the late 1980s, he simply had grown too large,

cumbersome and slow to hunt the same small and agile prey items as fellow crocodiles. So he's literally just like, he couldn't move his body efficiently enough or quick enough to be capturing these same prey items, which I thought is kind of an interesting idea. Or fish or whatever. Huh, that is interesting.

And like these small fish, even if you were to catch them, they weren't caloricly rewarding enough to even be worth it at that size, you know? Yeah. So maybe he learned that the relatively slow, predictable, and soft humans made for a much more conducive source of food for a crocodile that could no longer afford those energetically costly chases. But that didn't answer the question as to why he would kill, but then leave so many bodies

uneaten. Some herpetologists theorized that consuming large prey typically entails a crocodile to do that, we talked about it earlier, the death roll, to tear off chunks of. of flesh because like Wes said they don't chew they roll tear off a chunk and then swallow those chunks whole oh he's too fat to roll over they he's like he weighs so much that it's just like a burden yeah it's too much energy to get his giant body going well i was gonna say like at that size he's like bigger than a lot of great white sharks and for them when they bite something and they realize like oh this isn't even worth it they won't continue feeding and so i wonder if that was

of the same thing where he's like biting a leg and it's mostly bone and he's kind of like oh this isn't you know juice isn't worth the squeeze here yeah so at 2,000 pounds the death rule is probably just extremely exhausting so instead Gustav would kill a prey item and then wait for decomposition to further soft in the flesh while moving on to his next target later to return and you know nibble off easier he should start attacking things at the top of a hill and then just Roll down the hill. Oh, that's such a good idea. They would have to be fixed.

I don't, yeah. What's the closest hill to him? Kilimanjaro, right? I think it's hilly country. I think riverbeds normally have a hill, you know? That's true, like a little slope down into the water. Most hills don't have names. Is that true?

I don't know. It feels like everything has a name if you, like, zoom in close enough on Google Maps. Yeah, but who knows about Barundi. So that's theory one, the herpetologist view. So theory two, past trauma, the past trauma theory. As we've covered, Gustav is no stranger to being attacked by humans. It has since been learned that crocodiles have powerful long-term associative memories, remembering specific threats from up to 40 years ago.

Each time someone fired a gun at Gustav or stabbed him with a spear, his brain would store that information until he eventually associated humans with danger. with guns really starting to be a widespread item for the people of Barundi as he was eventually growing into what hunters would see as a pretty sizable hall of food and leather maybe he became the frequent target of bullets and other weapons and at some point began to see humans as a threat to proactively neutralize before they could cause him any more pain that's theory too and you can you can pass judgment on these if you think that holds water or not Wes you seem to think that it does not I don't like that theory yeah

Let's get on to Theory 3 since that, but Theory 2 was a bust for Wes. Wes was not busting due to Theory 2. Theory 3 is simple surplus killing. In predators like crocodiles, the cycle of killing and eating has taken shape over millions of years of evolution. As far back as the early 1970s, political unrest saw seemingly endless procession of human bodies floating down the Rusezi River, meaning that for a long stretch of Gustav's life, he didn't need to hunt or even necessarily, even be hungry in order to eat. He was just getting basically

just like the sushi conveyor belt was coming right at him. He didn't even have to work for it. We have to pay for the sushi too. He wasn't, he didn't. That's crazy. I bet you we could go to sushi conveyor belt, eat some sushi and leave. It's true.

Without paying? You could. You don't think we could? You don't have to pay. I feel bad. Yeah. I used to do that in Walmart a lot. I have sushi conveyor belts in Walmart. No, but I would take what I want. That's a really funny way to put that.

Yeah. Okay. Maybe during this period, Gustav's brain created a new association that humans equal to effortless food. When the human massacres ended and the river returned to normal, the easy abundance was gone, but that pattern in his brain remained. When tensions rose again in the mid-1980s, more people started moving to the riverbanks again.

Refugees from earlier conflicts or villagers displaced by political instability, whatever else was the case. And when humans started reappearing in greater numbers again, that old programming in Gustav's brain was reactivated. Instead of occasional opportunistic attacks, he shifted to systematic killing. Some researchers believe he may have been trying to stockpile more food than was necessary because he remembered that time when there was an abundance

and then all the sudden the abundance disappeared. That's the theory I like the most. That's theory three. That was what I thought of when you were, especially when you told the story of the boy that he bit, to me it made me think of like, oh, he probably thought he was dead and bit him and then realized he's alive and maybe not worth, you know,

wasn't the boy walking when he got bit? No, he's in the water. You're swimming. And if he had seen just hundreds of bodies, you know, and they'd all been dead and then started biting people that were alive, you know, it might be hard for a crocodile to really tell the difference for a while at least. It made me think of the leopard of Rudrapaiag, because if you guys remember that story, there was a big, like, I think it was whatever that fever was in the early 1900s.

They killed a bunch of people in like the end of World War I. A lot of people in India died and they think that leopard may have scavenged so much that it kind of started to see people as food. And I think that's very likely what happened with Gustav, too. Yeah. Maybe that's what happened in the, well, maybe not, actually. I was thinking of the Donner Party. But that didn't, they probably didn't, like, spend enough.

I don't know. That's just another hypothesis. We're just doing science. Yeah, if that, because they would have then ate a lot of people once they got to their location. Right. I don't think they did that. Maybe they did.

I don't know. It seems like we would know. So these three theories are compelling, but they all fail to answer one question. Why only Gustav? Thousands of other crocodiles that lived more or less the same life as him, but hadn't really developed these same tendencies.

Another question to grapple with was whether all of these deaths were actually being caused by Gustav in the first place. To backtrack a little bit, the assassination of Barundi's president triggered a civil war that lasted from Jeff. Oh, the one you said before. Uh-huh.

Yeah. 2005. Yeah, that's the end. And 1980, or no, 19, Jurassic Park, right? 1993. There we go, baby. Oh, A plus. I'm going to buy you a Costco cake as a reward.

One of those pistachio ones. So that civil war that lasted from 1993 until 2005 would see the deaths of approximately 300,000 people. Coincidentally, or maybe not so coincidentally. I'm kind of like Gustavo. Yeah, surplus killing. Because he just ate like one leg and would leave and stuff, you know? You're exactly the same as old. If Allison saw you, she'd be like, I loved her.

They'd be like, why is this beefy boy not eating all of his cake? They'd track you for years. The basketball would make more sense. They'd follow you around for years and just be like, what is going on here? What is wrong with this guy? Maybe he has a vendetta against cakes. Oh, it's Mick Rib season. I was about to go crazy.

So coincidentally, or maybe not so coincidentally, the exact same stretch of time of this Civil War, coincides nearly perfectly with Gustav's highest concentration streak of kills. Maybe you're starting to do a little bit of mental deductions here. Maybe you'd be a huge hit in ancient Greece, if you're doing that whole Aristotle thing where you're like making deductions. Mike, you can't do a tangent on every single thing you say. We're going to be here for eight hours. We're close to the end here.

Over the 20 years when he was most actively preying on humans, Gustav's tally sits somewhere between the 60 confirmed victims and over 300 suspected. But the exact number is impossible to verify in a region with thousands of other crocodiles and a dozen other reasons why someone might disappear from the bank of the river. Again, other crocodiles, maybe hippos,

maybe seasonal floodings or mudslides, many other things like you know as sad as it is to think about it maybe they could have been politically or ethnically charged slaughterings or and some truly evil men on the other side of these borders that brundi shares with other countries sometimes people would be abducted and conscripted into military efforts for other countries so like a number of factors could be contributing to these disappearances and they were just being blamed on gustav because it made for kind of like a fanciful tale of a monster Yeah. On that note, too, you keep saying like, oh, how come all the other crocodiles weren't doing this? They very well could have been. Probably were. But it's just that Gustav was so big and recognizable that they were blamed on him. So it's very likely that a lot of these other crocodiles were also killing people because a lot of people die from crocodiles.

Yeah. Mike, that military deduction, like that you just had, that was good deducting, that they might be like kidnapping children for military. purposes. It was aristotelian of me to do that, right? Yeah. Thank you. I just was born in the wrong decade. I see how you tied that back in. It was very important earlier. Thank you. Honestly, though, again, even if it was just half of the confirmed 60 victims, like, it's no wonder that Gustav became a waking nightmare for many of the people living near the waters in Burundi. That 30 people over however many years. That's like, if you think about serial killers in the human world, that would cause mass hysteria if it was all happening in like this small geographic area over 20 years, you know?

So, he had learned how to prey on humans and survive their retaliation. Let's go back to Patrice and his team, and we're going to finish this up here. So still under pressure from the 60-day deadline they were given, they quickly finished building the 30-foot steel cage and enlisted the help of 30 men to help lift and carry at the 4.5 from their village to the Delta where they had most recently spotted Gustav. An infrared camera was mounted inside the cage to detect any form of life in the dark, and then they slid it into the water with a severed cow's head inside to serve as bait. But the legend loomed large over them,

culminating when a Gatumba village medicine man ominously warned them that Gustav was under the spell of an evil person, and he would never enter that cage until that spell was broken. A week passed, and each morning the team woke up to find an empty, cage and they grew more pessimistic by the day. Time was running out fast so when Gustav was spotted on a high bank nearly a mile from where the cage had been set up, the team quickly assembled and set up a few smaller traps in a last ditch Hail Mary effort to catch him. And add a bit of insult to the whole operation. As they were building one of these small, they call him Pitman traps. And it shows this

in the documentary. Gustav is in the water watching them build this trap. His eye head facing them. He's just sitting there watching them do it as if to say just like, this isn't going to work. This is, yeah, like that trap is going to cap. They're trying to catch him alive. Capture him alive still. Yeah. 48 hours later, one of the pit and traps was set off,

but the crocodile inside of it was a young, small one. Even at its small size, though, the team had difficulty corraling and releasing it. So they knew that even if they were to miraculously catch Gustav in one of these tiny traps, be virtually impossible to do anything anyway. So they're just like, we're at the end of it here. We got to go back to the cage. The cage is really the only thing that's going to work here.

So they changed out the cowhead at first to a live chicken. And when that didn't work, speaking of Jurassic Park, they tied up a live goat inside of it. And there's like some infrared night vision footage from the camera. It literally looks like Jurassic Park. Yeah, very much. This dog doesn't want to be fed. He wants to hunt.

He wants to roll. Finally, they saw a glimmer of, hope, during one of the following nights, a white spot began showing up on the camera when they checked the footage the next day. This white eye dot was so large that they knew it could only be Gustav. He had eyes on the goat and was at least considering going into the cage to get it. Fittingly, a huge storm was predicted to hit during the last night the operation was allowed to be run. When the team anxiously walked down to the cage the next morning, they found the cage partially submerged in the water, the camera destroyed, and the goat was nowhere to be seen.

Was it the water level that suddenly rose during that stormy night? Did Gustav somehow enter without triggering the trap, eat the goat, and destroy the camera? Whatever happened, they had failed to catch the crocodile, and their time was finally up. At the time, crocodiles were seen as simple predators driven by basic instincts, and yet Gustav refused to touch it. We now know that crocodiles are far better at weighing risk against reward than anyone was thinking back. then. Maybe Gustav's brain flagged the structure as a change in his environment shouldn't be there. And as a crocodile that was already playing by his own rules, it shouldn't have come as a surprise that a simple steel trap wouldn't be enough to stop him. You briefly mentioned this earlier,

but because of their metabolism, they don't have to eat that often. So if a crocodile sees something as like a potential risk even, it's probably not going to go for it because it doesn't have to, Unless they're desperate, unless there hasn't been food or something. But for Gustav, where it seems like there's plenty of food, there's no reason for him to take a risk and go inside of a trap. So for over 20 years, Gustav had been one of the most sought after targets in Burundi, and for 20 years no one had any luck in catching or killing him. Charging at a crowd in broad daylight, as he was known to do,

required an absence of fear. But the fact that he could switch from that sort of fearlessness to a caution that kept him from entering that steel cage, left the team in awe of his intelligence. If it wasn't clear before, it was clear now that Gustav was not just any ordinary crocodile. The 60-day window closed and the scientists had to leave. Gustav had won again. For the next five years, he all but disappeared. He was spotted once in 2009, and that was the last time a credible source would ever see him again.

If he's still alive, he would be around 80 years old today. Nobody has ever been found, so many people still look twice before approaching the river water's edge. As long as there's no proof of his, death the legend of Gustav lives on i like that well that's the story of gustave any any further questions your honor no i'm glad we did it this is one i thought about for a long time so i'm glad you took the reins yeah thanks mike yeah he got a he seems like he killed some people but how many we don't know yeah yeah yeah that's why i would say 60 people 60 confirmed is, I mean, come on now.

Yeah, for a crocodile, that's a lot. There's a good amount. Some of these big cats have killed a lot more people, but they also feed a lot more often, you know? And so for a crocodile, that's like, that's a good amount of people. They should, the people in the Epstein list should just blame a crocodile, I think, for all the missing kids and stuff. It could work.

They'd probably. Not that they really need to. They seem to be getting away with it. We're probably not far from that. Yeah. Honestly. So we need to talk about Patrice just real quick. Yeah.

We teased it. And I'm going to be delicate here because this is like a pretty touchy thing that happened. In 2011, about six or seven years after he was the star of that PBS documentary and was kind of the central figure to this whole story outside of Gustav. In 2011, a court in Barundi found. him guilty of sexually assaulting five young girls who attended the school that he had set up to help underprivileged children in the area. Geez, right after Jeff brings up Epstein.

Yeah. Tough timing. But he was ultimately sentenced to 25 years in jail in a closed door trial. Of course, he denied the charges and said he would appeal. And the French foreign ministry stepped in and took exception to the proceedings. There's a lot of just like irregularities and inconsistencies. with how this trial was actually run. And the main accuser in this trial, one of the young girls,

actually did write in a letter of apology explaining that she had accused him out of some petty form of revenge. And another one of the accusers, one of the young girls, actually said that she had done it because she had been bribed by a competing German organization that was operating in the same time and space as Patrice down there, too. So like, again, maybe he does deserve to be like buried behind the prison, never to be heard from ever again. Fed to Gustav. Yeah. But maybe this was like a weird conspiracy.

And I don't know that gets you going, Jeff. Like this weird shadowy German organization that's like we need to get Patrice out of the way. On Gustav. I just wanted to make a small note. And one detail I really need to include here is that so he was in. this really awful prison system. It was built for 800 people. There were 3,500 people in it at the time of Patrice's holding. And according to some of the former prisoners, they would regularly catch rats and cook and eat them. And Patrice, when they were interviewing him as he was talking to, maybe

his defense team, I don't know exactly who was talking to, but he, quote, retained his sense of humor and said, from a crocodile hunter, I have become a bedbug hunter. So, even in like the worst possible scenario someone could be in he's still cracking off jokes yeah um yeah the occum's razor thing makes me wonder about the shadowy german organization and stuff like and and again we shouldn't pass judgment but if i had to guess like i would guess that he probably is guilty he he was an interesting figure if you watched the documentary i mean anyone who decides to spend 30 years of their life in a country that's not their own chasing a huge crocodile, you know, maybe, I'm not saying like that's wrong or anyone that decides to engage in that

kind of behavior is a little off their rocker. But like, you can kind of sense that he's a man who maybe was never quite all the way acclimated to, yeah, like human civilization. But again, so possibly we talked about two monsters, one of them much worse than the other. Which one's worse? Patrice. Patrice. I don't know. Gustav killed a lot of kids.

Yeah, but he's just doing natural behavior. Like, yeah. I don't think he's a monster. I think we would need more information on the case to guess if he's guilty or not. I'm just saying like when I hear that, I tend to believe the victims. But like. I think that's the appropriate response. But I also don't want to.

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First category, your favorite team of three or an iconic trio. Jeff, please. Yeah, I feel like my brain went to basketball because there's been a lot of like three players that win championships. And like the one that comes to the mind would be Ray Allen, Kevin Garnett, and Paul Pierce when they teamed up. But I didn't ever love any of the big threes. Rodman, Jordan, and Pippin. Yeah.

And for whatever reason, they almost don't get included in a big three. Yeah. But it does, it is. I mean, the biggest three was LeBron, Bosch, and Wade. But I'm going to go with Homeward Bound. The two dogs and the cat. Iconic. They fight it and Mountain Lion Off.

They jump in a river. they get out of that hole. One gets porcupined. Yeah. I'm going to go with the two of you and Brent when you lived in the cube. That was like maybe the most fun I've had hanging out with like a trio because you guys just had the weirdest things happening in that house all the time with your roommates. And like just coming over and playing Smash Brothers on like this. 20-foot TV that Jeff inherited that weighed like 10,000 pounds, like the size of Gustav.

Yeah. And all three of you were like semi-employed at the time. So it was just like a real iconic time in your all's friendship. And I'm glad that I got to kind of be a tangential figure in it. We should run that back, dude. Let's go back. Back to the cube. Back to the cube.

That TV has got to still be there. There's no way anyone's moved that. No. Yeah, that's there forever. My favorite team of three is from the movie The Heroic Trio. It's an old martial arts movie with Michelle Yo, Maggie Chung, and Anita Mueir. It's just the most fun martial arts movie I've watched in a really long time. Three Ninjas.

Shout out three ninjas. Got it. I can't forget the three ninjas. Shout up Blink 182 for me too. That was my second. Yeah. Okay. Got me into punk music when I was a kid, even though a lot of people don't like them.

That was my gateway drug. Yeah. We all start our journey somewhere. Yeah. What's something you've eaten too much of recently? Honestly, one slice of that pistachio cheesecake was too much. That same trip to Costco that I bought that, I bought these peanut butter cups that I really like. They're called like skinny dipped.

And they're really good. They're like dark chocolate with peanut butter cup. And they're three grams of sugar apiece. And so in my mind, I'm like, oh, great. You know, this is like a healthy peanut butter cup. And then I'll eat like 10 of them in one sitting. And so I eat way too many of them to where I'm probably getting more sugar than I would if I just ate like a double pack of Reese's or something. So that's something I've been eating too much of.

This one, I think, is the best for Mike just because as much as anyone I know, he can eat a whole bag of. Just something he just bought and just down it in an hour. It's so bad. But I'm currently on a business trip in Maine. So I've been eating too much lobster rolls and cups of chowda. Lobster. Yeah. Everywhere I go, that's all I order.

And it's like, Jeff, order some other stuff. Is that Danielle? My favorite ever was I said, yeah, I'll take a cup of chowder. And she's like, oh, a cup of chowder. Like corrected me Yeah That's great I wish your business partner spoke

With a really heavy Boston accent I know Northeastern accent More like a yeah like a main accent Like the guy in Pet Cemetery Our business partner Yes Our business yeah sorry

Yeah shout out our business partner We love her around here Yeah I think we have a different business relationship With her than you do Yeah So my I've been on this weird thing where I'm trying to my whole life you see that bottom row of snacks and treats at gas stations and I've never in my whole life seen someone eating like a what you'ma call it or a zero bar. So I've been trying all of these different snacks that I've never had and I recently tried cow tails for the first time.

Yeah, I love a cowtail. Dude, what the heck? Yeah. I should have been eating these a long time ago. Yeah. They are so freaking good. Jesse's not a fan of candy or like sweets, but she loves a cowtail. Yeah, man.

So have you been eating too many cowtails or not enough? I've had 16 cowtails in the past 24 hours. Wow, that's a lot of cowtails. They come in packs of four, though. That's the problem with cowtails. It's like you can't ever just buy like a reasonable amount. Not that that would stop me anyway. They're very dense, though.

It's like a very dense candy. I know. It's getting bad. So I got to stop that. Something that ended up looking way bigger and more impressive than you expected it to. I can start. Going to the Titanic Museum in Pigeon Forge where they just have a Titanic replica as part of the building, it was a lot bigger than I expected it to be. It's just like the Titanic that you walk inside pretty much.

Also, Ben Affleck's penis in Gone Girl. You see his penis in that? I just watched that. Uh-huh. He gets out of shower and it's like, in the shower? Yeah. You normally shrinks a bit. I heard he tugged on it a bit.

Yeah, a little fluffing. I would. If I was an actor and I was going to have my penis on screen. That's the problem with viewing habits today is people are looking at their phone when they should be looking at Ben Affleck's penis. Probably what happened. I was pretty locked in. Because I just watched this documentary about Scott Peterson.

I was like, oh, Gone Girl really is about Scott Peterson. And so I was watching it. And yeah, I missed the dick. My answer was icebergs in Antarctica. I remember when we were planning on going to Antarctica, I knew the icebergs were going to be there and I knew they would be cool. I didn't realize they would look like small countries. Like I didn't realize just how big those tabular icebergs were.

And they were insanely big. and impressive. So icebergs really blew me away. That's one of those things like we were talking about earlier. They name all of those. Every iceberg is named. A lot of them. That's why I think every,

a lot of hills are probably named too. Jim. Like, probably not like, I don't know. Gary. I'm going with the Colosseum. I was pretty dumbfounded by the Colosseum when we went. Jeff and I were in Rome. I had kind of mental breakdown.

Just considering it. Like I had to sit down and like kind of process and look at it and almost acknowledge out loud that it was real and that real people had built it however long ago. I just had a really hard time processing it for whatever reason. But that was a really impressive building. That's how I feel whenever I go to like New York and you're just surrounded by all these massive buildings and you think like all of these buildings were built by people. It's crazy. It's really odd to think about that. Yeah.

along a similar line so I just got back from Nashville recently did you guys know that there's a one to one replica of the Parthenon in Nashville No You told me Yeah what the heck That's that was so weird to me

Like that does Greece know about that Speaking of Greece Aristotle Wes Yeah What about him He deduced He was deducting He was like Sherlock

Yeah He was the proto Sherlock Okay Next category. What's your favorite set of teeth in pop culture? I have a couple, but I really like the velociraptors in Jurassic Park. I think they got good teeth. And then I like Bilbo when Frodo shows them the ring.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a good teeth. It's such a good jump scare. Well, I was going to say Hades from the animated Hercules, where he just has like a few sharp teeth that are just like, he has like, he has like five of them. And I always thought that was really interesting and I liked his teeth. But honestly, Jeff bringing up the early renders of Sonic in like the first trailer and now he had like weirdly human teeth and small eyes. Why? Might be my favorite teeth from pop culture. Because I don't think

there's ever been such a swift rebuttal of a trailer where people were like, no, absolutely not. We're not seeing this movie. So bad that they had to change all the CG in the movie. It's pretty amazing. That is one conspiracy I wholeheartedly believe in, is that they knew what they were doing and they had the real Sonic already in place. Oh, just to like drum up. Needed it a little bit of like weird, crazy. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going with this old book called In a dark, dark room. It's this old picture book. And there's this story where a kid keeps encountering men with progressively larger and grosser sets of teeth. Yeah. And I remember just being pretty traumatized. by those pictures when I was little,

but I would always flip to those pages. It's kind of captivating for some reason to me. Have either of you seen the horror movie, teeth about vagina dentata? Yeah, Brent had me watch that one. I was going to have you do it for the, no pants, but I guess I won't. That's a good one.

We'll have Jeff do it. I like Nami when she gets mad at Luffy. Shark teeth already. That's such a good game. Common anime thing is. in it or is that just one piece? Unusual. Yeah, pretty trope.

Ubuitous trope. I think that's it, right? Is that all the categories? No. No. Fine. You had the wildest category in a while.

Which one? Your top two sides in the American Civil War. Yeah. What are they? I went with the Union and the Confederates. Okay.

Yeah. That's the same order. actually. Oh, it doesn't have to be in any specific order. It's just your top two. Miami is in a specific order, though, actually. The thing about the South is you get an iconic Jeff out of it. Jefferson Davis.

So I got to count him as Jeff's doing things, you know? Do you count Jefferson's as Jeff's? Oh, yeah. Other part of the club, huh? Yeah, I'm pretty squarely, like, union number one and then the Confederacy. Me too, but that was. The category is just in the top two. You also asked if you can think of one an example of a weird or inappropriately timed joke.

Oh, I forgot I had asked that. Yeah, do you have an answer? I had Danny Green at the Holocaust Museum where he said I had to just once in a selfie. Why? What was he doing? L-O-L. Hit him with the L-O-L. Had to do it.

I didn't come up with one for that, but I did come up with one for the exaggeration category that you had. Oh, shoot. I sent all kinds of stuff I didn't ask. Yeah, the exaggeration one, you said like a crazy exaggeration that we could think of. And I thought of Kim Jong-un saying that he golfs in 18 every time he goes golfing. Like it's a hole-in-one on every single golf course. He's so good at golf. Yeah.

And bowling, too. He's really good at bowling. Yeah, it gets a 300. Shout out Kim Jong-un. Yeah, the best that ever did it. Kind of like a Pillsbury. He's like the Pillsbury doughboy a little bit. Kind of.

Whenever I see him, I start wanting to eat croissants. Like poke his stomach and see if he giggles. Yeah. Do you think he, he probably giggles. He seems like a giggler. Like, even the most evil people in the world, I think, or from time to time. They are known to giggle, I'm sure.

Yeah. All right, that's it. Unless there are any other categories, I neglected to remember and ask about. I am done talking. All right. All right. Thanks, Mike.

Great. Sure. Quick, just quick plug. Those of you who listened to our Roer episode with David Desmouchin, one of our favorite episodes ever, so fun having him on. We did do a Roar review on our Patreon and our Grizz Club. It was really fun. We actually dove into the movie itself and had a pretty goofy time with it.

I had a lot of fun recording that episode. And then we did a roar watch party with our Discord audience, which if you join Patreon or Grizz Club, you can get access to our Discord. And there's a really fun community on there. We had a really fun time talking with them while we watched that movie. So just one of the many perks to Patreon. We are, I mean, we've been running that now for like four years. There are hundreds. I mean, I would say there's probably 100 to 200 hours of extra calls.

content on there now, if not more. There's more than that. So you get access to all of that for 10 bucks a month. That prices remain constant throughout our history and we're planning on keeping it the same. So there you go. All right. Thanks, Mike. You're welcome. All right. Love you guys. Love you. See yeah. Bye.