Courageous like Crocodile Dundee, Using a snare pole in the dead of night, Brazilian biologist Ricardo Freitas captures a caiman and hoists it into his little wooden boat.
He grabs the lizard by the snout and, unfazed by its sharp fangs, ties a black band around its muzzle so he can study it without getting bitten.
The 1.5-meter (five-foot) caiman is right at home in the lagoon waters of Jacarepagua, a vast, urban district on Rio de Janeiro’s west side whose name means “Valley of the Caimans” in the Tupi-Guarani Indigenous language.Despite the name, there is little trace in Jacarepagua these days of verdant valley or tropical forest: it is increasingly a concrete jungle, with upmarket high-rises surrounding the lagoon and tens of thousands of residents’ waste water emptying into it.Freitas’s boat floats on the foul-smelling water directly in front of the sprawling Olympic village from the 2016 Rio Games.
