DISTRIBUTION: Crocodylus acutus usually is a brackish water crocodilethat formerly occurred along the southern coast of Florida from Palm Beach County on the Atlantic Coast (a questionable record is from Lake Hamey, Volusia County by Maynard 1873) to at least Lee County on the Gulf of Mexico; Ashton and Ashton (1985) mapped a locality in Charlotte County. The species now is restricted to the Everglades and Keys in Dade and Monroe counties. The American Crocodile also is known from the islands of Little Cayman, Cayman Brac, Cuba, Isle of Pines, Jamaica, Hispaniola, Martinique, and Margarita (although Censky and Kaiser [I999] omitted mention of the purported population on Martinique). Populations are found along both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of Mexico, Central America, and northern South America from Tabasco, México southward to Colombia and Venezuela in the east, and from Sinaloa, México south to Ecuador and Rio Chira, Peni. Due to confusion of C. acutus with the primarily freshwater species C. moreletii along the eastern coast of Mexico, where the latter species also enters brackish waters, reports of C. acutus north of Tabasco are questionable. Several records for C.acutus from coastal localities in mainland Quintana Roo, and one from Yucatan may also be of C. moreletii (Lee 1996).
