Massive gator spotted taking a stroll in Sienna, the latest to be spotted in the Fort Bend County community

[cab67]

24. This is true.

A colleague of mine is herpetologist who retired from the University of Florida many years ago. He bought some land in a rural area that had extensive wetlands and built a house there. He bought the land specifically because of the wetlands - he studied frogs. But there was all sorts of other wildlife there, including alligators.

A few years after he moved in, a subdivision was built on the adjoining parcels. They drained many of the swamps.

But what really annoyed him was the people who moved there, many of whom were retirees from the Northeast. Every time they'd see a gator, they'd call it in, and someone would remove it.

Larger gators could indeed have been a threat to small grandchildren and many pets, but they were calling in two- and three-footers. These would only be a threat to one's pet if the pet was a hamster or gerbil. And they'd only be a problem with the grandkids if the grandkid grabbed it - and even then, nothing the gator could do would be lethal. No gator that size would attack a human unless it absolutely had to.

Rather than accepting that alligators are native to Florida and monitoring their pets and younger relatives, they decided to change the entire character of the local ecosystem, even when the threat was pretty much nil.

Four separate times over the past 25 years, Nile crocodiles were caught in Florida. (One of my former grad students was part of the study that determined them to be Nile crocs.) It was one of the exotics that had gotten loose over the years. One of them was large, and it was known to have escaped from an enclosure in Hendry County, but it was still confined in a fenced-in area, so it wouldn't have dispersed very far. The other three, however, were all found close to each other in Miami-Dade County, and they weren't confined in any way. Fortunately, none was bigger than about 0.5 meters. Had they remained undetected for longer, they might have reached breeding size. No Nile crocodile has been seen in Florida since 2014, so we appear to have gotten lucky.