The shell-cracking crabs, fish, sharks and rays that dominate bottom communities in temperate and tropical zones have been shut out of Antarctica for millions of years because it is simply too cold for them. However, climate change is about to cause a major upheaval in the shallow marine waters of Antarctica. Predatory crabs are poised to return to warming Antarctic waters and disrupt the primeval marine communities.

Antarctica’s coastal waters are warming rapidly. Temperatures at the sea surface off the western Antarctic Peninsula went up 1°C in the last 50 years, making it one of the fastest-warming regions of the World Ocean.

Rich Aronson, Professor of Biological Sciences at Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne said, “If the crab invasion succeeds, it will devastate Antarctica’s spectacular fauna and fundamentally alter its ecological relationships".

The gharial is the first crocodilian species to be re categorized as critically endangered on the 2007 IUCN Red List. With an inferred population of 5,000 to 10,000 in the 1940s, its numbers plummeted due to organized hunting for skin in the 1950s and 1960s, which led to a scattered and isolated population in India, Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Although hunting is no longer a threat, the construction of dams, barrages, irrigation canals, sand-mining and riverside agriculture, have all resulted in the irreversible loss of habitat for the gharial.

Nepal's Department of National Parks and WWF -Nepal Live have now taken initiative to protect the species and fourteen gharials fitted with radio tags have been released into the Rapti River in Nepal in an attempt to identify the reasons for the alarming decline for these.

They will be monitored by Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology by a team from Chitwan National Park.