There's a whole series of body postures that would alert me to a croc about to take me out. Let's work on crocs of under ten feet first. When you're dealing with saltwater crocs, a female reaches sexual maturity at around 8 feet and 8 years of age and a male at about 10 feet and ten years. The smaller ones are less inclined to take a swing at a person. There's a whole lot of hoo-hah floating around that the crocodile has a small brain and that he's not very intelligent.
Some people think they're very dumb, like a frog or something.
But when you get a perspective on their environment and understand that crocodiles have been on the planet for 65 million years, it's their instincts that I would consider to be their intelligence. Crocodiles of less than ten feet are less likely to strike because they are so instinctively clever. They see me as a largish mammal that couldn't be had easily. I prefer the word 'strike' to 'attack', since they are reptiles and that's what reptiles do. I'll talk about the bigger ones now, those 12 feet and above.