With a healthy population of alligators already inhabiting wild areas, nuisance alligators are not relocated but are humanely euthanized. If smaller alligators find their way into a pool or garage, for example, they can be removed. It must be at least 4 feet in length and believed to be a threat. Before calling about an alligator, though, be sure that it meets the criteria to be considered a nuisance. If you are concerned about the presence of an alligator, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has a toll-free Nuisance Alligator Hotline at 866-FWC-GATOR (86). As for humans, few alligator encounters result in direct fatalities, but bites can cause serious infection so medical treatment is necessary. But there are some things they know to be true: Birds are a terrible meal, due to having very little meat on their bones, which is why birds can stand and hunt peacefully along shorelines. Their opportunistic feeding style is evidence of this.
Their brains are so tiny they cannot think or consider.
Even so, small alligators or even alligator eggs are an essential part of the food chain and can be snatched by fish, birds, snakes, raccoons and, yes, larger alligators.Īppropriate to the phrase “reptilian mind,” alligators operate on instinct. As alpha predators, they keep aquatic animal populations in balance. Thousands of alligators thrive in the lake, rivers and wetlands of the Myakka area. In Florida, you can assume that alligators can be found in any fresh or brackish water. However, they have evolved a shunt between the left and right aorta that allows their heart to function like three-chambered ones do, enabling a lower metabolic rate that they need to stay underwater for extended periods.
Their four-chambered hearts are more like those of warm-blooded mammals and avians, which helps prove that they share a common dinosaur ancestor with birds. While alligators are cold-blooded animals, they don’t have a typical reptilian three-chambered heart. Someone could have come across a rare sighting of an alligator as a child of the late 1950s and see that same creature sunning itself today. Our imagined Myakka gator would have been one of the 10 to survive its first year, one of eight to make it to sub-adulthood (reaching 4 feet in length) and then one of five to reach maturity. Gators typically hatch in groups of 24 to 37 and emerge from their nest between mid-August and September. Alligators have the potential to live to 70 years old, which means that there might be an alligator in the Myakka River right now that hatched all the way back in 1953.
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