TORONTO - There's a picture of it, yet experts can't find what's believed to be a crocodile or alligator swimming in a southern Ontario pond.

So efforts to catch it are off -- for now.

A picture of the suspect crocodilian's head was snapped Sunday by a wildlife photographer, setting off a hunt in Van Wagner's pond in Hamilton that one zoo expert likened to the search for Scotland's Loch Ness monster.

"It's not confirmed 100 per cent there's a crocodile there," said Bry Loyst, curator of the Peterborough, Ont.-area Indian River Reptile Zoo.

"It's kind of like the Loch Ness monster or there's a crocodile that swam away," he added wryly.

"It's one or the other. We don't know."

Loyst scoured the pond in Confederation Park on Tuesday evening after he saw "something" the night before. The pond connects to Red Hill Creek and Lake Ontario is nearby.

Loyst suspects the more than metre-long reptile was someone's pet, released because it got too big.

He doesn't think the public is in danger.

Hundreds of reptiles are sold in Ontario at pet stores or reptile expos each year, Loyst said. Municipal bylaws for keeping exotic pets vary.

There's no way to track how many reptile pets are dumped into the wild, but it's been a growing problem for many years, said Zoocheck Canada executive director Rob Laidlaw.

Most don't survive Canada's colder weather but those that do, such as the red-eared slider turtle, displace native species.

"The release of pets into the wild has caused them to establish themselves throughout the Great Lakes, through Quebec and Western Canada," said Laidlaw.

Reptile smuggling is big business in Canada, worth millions if not billions of dollars, and is right up there money-wise with gun and drug smuggling, Loyst said.

Vipers, cobras and turtles are popular for smugglers. Many die in transit, he added.

Last week, a Niagara-on-the-Lake man pleaded guilty to trying to smuggle over 1,000 tortoises, turtles, boa constrictors and pythons across the Queenston-Lewiston bridge in September 2009.

"It's a huge business," said Melissa Matlow with the Canadian arm of the World Society for the Protection of Animals.

"There's certainly a trend to have more dangerous animals to try to prove something about yourself, that you're a tough person."

During a January raid, Timmins police found an alligator at a marijuana grow-op.

Hamilton Conservation Authority ecologists will monitor the pond daily using binoculars but won't call in Loyst again to catch the creature unless it resurfaces, said assistant ecologist Lisa Jennings.

The community is asked to keep its eyes open, said Jennings, who saw the creature's head and snout Monday night.

The reptile was likely dropped off within the past two weeks because it was too cold before then for it to have survived. It can't live in water below 15 degrees, she said.

The crocodilian might be burrowing itself on the bottom of the pond to keep warm, said Jennings, who hopes the stressed reptile might surface to sun itself during the day.

Gosslings, birds and fish would let the "opportunistic feeder" survive, she said.