Every spring, when alligators get frisky, at least one, if not several, people in the South get bitten or even killed by one of the big swamp lizards. Last week, it was an elderly man in South Carolina, who was gardening near a pond when a gator latched onto him. Joseph Roeser, 80, was lucky to have his wife nearby. She took a tomato stake and stabbed the gator in the head until it released her husband.
The list of other recent victims goes on. It includes kayakers, fishermen, disc golfers, scuba divers, and a few other senior citizens who were attacked by alligators in their own neighborhoods. And although these folks might not like hearing it, wildlife experts at the University of Florida and Centre College say that in almost all of these incidents, it’s the people — and not the gators — who were at fault.
In a new study, published Wednesday in the journal Human-Wildlife Interactions, researchers found that in 96 percent of recorded gator attacks, some form of “human inattention” or “risk-taking” preceded the attack. Centre College biology professor Mark Teshera, one of the study’s lead authors, drew a comparison between gators and snakes, which are often blamed for being overly aggressive, when in reality, they mostly bite people when they are startled or about to get stepped on.
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“I wondered if crocodilians had an unwarranted reputation for attacks the same way snakes do,” Teshera said in a UF press release summarizing the study. “It was important to establish a ranking system for risky human behaviors because it showed that the overwhelming majority of bites stemmed from some level of humans engaging in risky behavior in places where alligators live.”
To create this ranking system, researchers dug into the CrocBITE database and looked hundreds of years of records of human-alligator interactions. The team then analyzed those records alongside news reports and investigations by wildlife agencies to determine whether the level of “human behavior risk” was low, moderate, high, or no risk at all.
They concluded that most bites and attacks followed moderate-risk behaviors, such as swimming or wading in waters with known alligator populations. By the same logic, fatal attacks were more likely to occur after high-risk behaviors, like knowingly jumping into a gator-infested pond to retrieve a frisbee. (Yes, this has happened.)
But the catch here is that you don’t have to do something dumb or risky — like actively provoke a gator — to still be considered at fault, by the researchers’ standards. Joseph Roeser was simply gardening by a pond when he was attacked by the gator.
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“The takeaway lesson … is that many bites can be prevented if humans are aware of their surrounding and minimize risky behaviors such as walking small pets near bodies of water or swimming where alligators are known to be present,” says Frank Mazzotti, another lead authors and a professor of wildlife ecology at UF. “Ultimately, the study underscores that situational awareness and informed choices, especially during recreational activities in alligator country, can help protect both people and wildlife.”
So, in other words, researchers have concluded what we’ve always known: The gators were here first, and we’re interlopers in their habitat. So if you find yourself near gator-infested waters anytime soon, remember to watch your six.
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