Reptiles & amphibians · plate 41 of 60
Crocodile
Crocodylus niloticus
Patience is a strategy. So is the bite.
Only 1.3% of people are Crocodiles. (estimated)
If you're a Crocodile
You wait. Not nervously, not strategically, just wait, because the thing you want will come to the water's edge eventually and you see no reason to go and fetch it. People read your stillness as calm and they are mostly right. You spend almost nothing, you waste almost nothing, and when you finally move, it is over before anyone has finished their sentence.
A Nile crocodile can go for months without a meal, and when one does eat, it does so with the strongest bite ever measured in a living animal; crocodilians hold that record.
The Crocodile as a spirit animal
You don't start things you can't finish, and you don't finish things you didn't start, which is why your to-do list is short and complete. Patience like yours is rare and slightly unnerving; people are never sure whether you are relaxed or hunting, and you have stopped correcting them. The flaw is that waiting looks like indifference, and sometimes it is. A crocodile has been built this way since before the dinosaurs left, and sees no reason to update.
Grounded in how the species actually lives; nothing borrowed from anyone's tradition. Why we put it that way.
How to get along with a Crocodile
Do
- Let silences run; to this person they are not awkward, they are the baseline.
- Bring them the finished plan and let them say yes once.
- Respect the sunny spot, the fixed routine and the long afternoon of nothing.
Don't
- Don't poke them to check whether they're awake. They are.
- Don't take an open mouth for an invitation; crocodiles gape to cool down.
When it goes wrong: A crocodile that has decided is already moving; argue beforehand, not during, and leave it a clear route back to the water afterward.
The Crocodile in a relationship
You take your time and then you don't. Courtship, for you, is a long period of appearing uninterested followed by a sudden and total commitment. You are loyal in the way of fixed habits: the same stretch of river, the same partner, the same spot in the sun. You will guard what is yours for months without being asked.
Field notes
Every animal is placed on six personality traits derived from how the species lives. Your answers are placed on the same six, and the closest animal wins. How the scoring works
- Sociability
- 4
- Boldness
- 10
- Energy
- 1
- Curiosity
- 1
- Devotion
- 6
- Roaming
- 2
- The temperature of the nest decides whether a hatchling is male or female.
- The mother guards her nest for around three months, then carries the hatchlings to the water in her mouth.
- Crocodiles cannot chew; they swallow stones, which sit in the stomach and are thought to help grind food.
Crocodiles in literature
- The Crocodile — The Elephant's Child (Just So Stories), Rudyard Kipling (1902)
- The Crocodile — Peter and Wendy, J. M. Barrie (1911)
- The Little Crocodile — Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (How Doth the Little Crocodile), Lewis Carroll (1865)
Characters from public-domain works. Company, not a verdict.
Closest personalities
The animals whose profiles sit nearest to the Crocodile's. If you got Crocodile, one of these was probably your runner-up.
Other reptiles & amphibians
Among the 60
Friedrich Specht (1839–1909), Meyers Konversations-Lexikon, Bibliographisches Institut (1907). Public domain, viacommons.wikimedia.org.All credits
