Giant Crocodile Said To Have Eaten 300 People: 'They Never Kill for Fun'

For decades, the people of Lake Tanganyika in Burundi have been terrorized by an enormous man-eating crocodile known as Gustave.

The Nile crocodile is rumored to have killed over 300 people and has earned legendary status in the area along the Rusizi River.

Crocodile specialist Marc Gansuana told Newsweek that Gustave has been known about for some time, and the National Geographic have found records of his attacks on villagers dating back to 1987.

However, he was only formally identified and named in 2001 by herpetologist Patrice Faye.

Gustave is thought to be one of the largest crocodiles in Africa, stretching nearly 20 feet long and weighing approximately 2,000 pounds. "His size [means] he cannot be mistaken with any other one in his territory," Gansuana said.

In a 2002 interview with the BBC, Faye said that the crocodile's enormous size was potentially responsible for his human-heavy diet.

"He is three times as big as the other crocodiles in Burundi," Faye said. "He is not very fast and cannot feed on what other crocodiles in Burundi eat, namely fish and small mammals. He attacks slow prey, which are easy to capture."

Most of the time, Gustave spends his days on a small river island near Lake Tanganyika, the second largest lake in Eastern Africa.

However, during mating season Gustave travels along the banks of the Ruzizi River, and it is then that he is at his most dangerous, Faye said.

"He travels all the way to the areas of Rumonge and Minago and eats fishermen and bathers en route. He can eat 10, 15 or 20 people along the bank. One year, I followed the path he took on one of his forays and 17 people had been eaten between Kanyosha and Minago, and Kabezi and Magara."

But even for such a beast, killing 300 people is quite a feat. Gansuana said this figure was only an estimate and that it was very difficult to gather accurate death statistics for such a wild animal.

"The reliability of such statistics is difficult to assess in this kind of case," he said. "The most important thing to remember is that he was clearly a predator of the village of Gatumba."

Because Gustave rarely eats all of his prey, the locals have suggested that Gustave does not only kill for food, but also for fun.

However, Gansuana said this was not the case: "They never kill for fun. Crocodiles have very few requirements in terms of quantity of food. Once killed, a prey item is not entirely consumed, except in very special circumstances.

"Thus, most of [Gustav's] prey—humans or cattle—were found almost whole, with only a few parts missing, which could explain why people thought it was killing for fun and not for food."

Gansuana said corpses from war that had been washed up by the river may also have been wrongly attributed to Gustave.

Gustave has not been seen since 2016, but, being over 75 years old, Gansuana said the monster crocodile could still be out there.

"It is difficult to confirm that he is dead, nobody seems to have bragged about having killed him, and his territory is immense, virtually the whole of Lake Tanganyaka and its tributaries!"

Perhaps Gustave is just lying low until his next strike.

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