Grand Caymans Croc Investigated by TX State

The out-of-place crocodile found in the Caymans is being tested through cooperation with the wildlife department at Texas State University. From the University Star:

"Researchers from Texas State are involved in an international attempt to identify the origin of an American Crocodile that swam to Grand Cayman from an unknown location.
"The endangered American Crocodile, Crocodylus acutus, was forced from Grand Cayman around 1500 A.D. because of over-hunting shortly after Europeans came to the island.
"Andrew Hope, Cayman Island department of environment marine enforcement officer, contacted Mike Forstner, associate professor in the department of biology, after a young male crocodile measuring more than 2 meters in length was found swimming into Old Man Bay Dec. 30.
"Wildlife officials in Grand Cayman want to return the crocodile to its home and needed help from the Texas State wildlife biology department to determine where the crocodile was from." ...
"Forstner said that he thinks the crocodile was forced from Cuba, where crocodile populations are healthy.
"'If it was in a population of crocs that had a lot of individuals in it, the big bull crocs are like, "Hey, I don’t like these little boys hanging around my ladies", and they would have pushed him out and he would have had to have gone somewhere (else),' Forstner said." ...
"Forstner said swimming or rafting from island to island is likely the way the crocodile originally got to the island." ...
"David Rodriguez, Texas State alumnus and Texas Tech doctoral student, has been working since 2005 on genetic markers that can identify the area where any American Crocodile may be from. He has worked with the Texas State wildlife biology program to compile genetic information from blood samples collected from individual crocs representing almost the entire range of crocodiles, and is currently writing his dissertation over the subject at Texas Tech." ...
"Acquiring the blood sample from Grand Cayman presents legal difficulties because it is against federal law to ship crocodile blood into the U.S. without a permit." ...
"To avoid the federal shipping rules involved in the international transportation of animal materials, the information used in testing for these genetic markers will be sent to Grand Cayman for analysis.
"'We will supply the markers, they will generate the data, then we will put it into our data set and do the analysis,' Forstner said.
"Researchers in Grand Cayman will use the markers supplied from Rodriguez’s research to determine what population of American Crocodile the captured one is from."

[Full news posted to StrangeArk archive.]