Gharials are among the world's most critically endangered reptiles, with fewer than 1,000 adults surviving in Indian rivers facing entanglement, habitat loss, and pollution.
Gharials face welfare threats throughout their life stages. Gillnet entanglement — drowning while trapped underwater — is acutely lethal for these air-breathing reptiles. Nesting females disturbed by sand mining abandon nests, resulting in egg mortality from heat or predation. The 2007–2008 mass mortality event demonstrated that cumulative environmental stressors — likely a combination of pollution and dietary toxin accumulation — can cause painful deaths from gout (uric acid crystal deposition in joints) at mass scale. Captive-reared juveniles released to rivers face high predation and low survival, meaning welfare improvements are difficult to achieve without fundamental riverine ecosystem restoration.