Kent Vliet studies alligator courtship and visual communication from an alligator's point of view (credit: Lisa Bibko/Kent A. Vliet).
Like me, Kent Vliet is a Florida native who loves alligators. And like me he has the scars and stories to prove it. The difference is that while I am an informed enthusiast, Kent is the world expert on the American alligator.
Kent once told me his enchantment with alligators began in childhood. “At the heart of it, alligators and crocodilians are the closest living things to the dinosaurs I loved in my youth. Working with them is my way of living with dinosaurs and dragons.”
Of course not everyone shares his love for these pointy-toothed, dinosaur-like creatures. As Kent put it, “There has always been a certain random persecution of these animals because they are big and they are predators and they are reptiles. Many people think anything that poses a danger to humans needs to be controlled or eliminated.” And while the alligator is no doubt a dangerous animal, Kent says his scars came from his attempts to capture them. “They were not caused by attacks on me. In fact, it was vice versa.”
Nonetheless, like many people who are dedicated to large predators, he has to overcome a lot of prejudice to win people over. He told me that he tries to emphasize positive aspects, such as the important ecological roles that the animals perform. And if that fails: “I even use economic value as a means of trying to justify their existence to someone who has no interests in ecological or aesthetic values.”
Ironically, the most dramatic and threatening decline in alligator populations had more to do with economics than persecution. In the late nineteenth century, crocodilian hides became accessories for high fashion, in Europe initially. And so the hides had quite a value to them. “Beginning in the late 1860s, there became a great economic incentive for people to go out and kill American alligators,” Kent said. “And they did in large numbers. Hunters and poachers killed alligators in an unrelenting fashion for a hundred years.”
The end of the Civil War introduced a particularly brutal era for the American alligator. Kent told me how young men came back from the war without jobs and without money—but they did have weapons, and they began shooting alligators for their hides. This was a completely unregulated harvest, and during that time it was not unheard of for a man to go out and kill fifty or sixty alligators on a single night and skin them right on the spot, leaving their carcass to rot.
Between the 1860s and 1970, 94 percent of the wild population had disappeared. In the southeastern United States, the population dropped from ten million to only a few hundred thousand. It’s not surprising, then, that the American alligator was one of the first dozen creatures placed on the Endangered Species List in 1976. However, you may be surprised to hear that today more than three and a half million alligators swim in the swamps, lakes, and rivers of the American South. The largest populations remain in Florida and Louisiana, but the alligator also thrives in nine other southern states from Texas east to North Carolina.
Kent told me that this great American success story is a testament to the power of having the “gator” (as it’s called in the South) listed under the newly formed Endangered Species Act. “Within just three years of the listing, we began to have populations in Louisiana showing up in sometimes uncomfortable numbers,” he said. “A little bit later in Florida the same thing was occurring, and there was a move to come up with new management plans for alligators that would allow ways to manage these alligators that were rebounding.” The fact that their resurgence in numbers parallels unprecedented land development and population growth in the same time and space makes this story even more remarkable.
So we foremost credit the Endangered Species Act. But Kent told me that it’s also important to credit the federal and local wetlands protection that ensured the alligator a safe habitat. It’s no good saving a species if it doesn’t have a healthy place to live. As long as we have legislation that protects wetlands, Kent believes we’ll have American alligators living in the Southeast.
Kent also pointed out that we should also give credit to this predator’s great mothering skills. In nature, typically, predatory species have low reproductive rates, since there is only so much room at the top of the trophic pyramid. But as Kent put it, “Alligators are amazing mothers.” The females build and then protect the nest. When the young are ready to hatch they emit a little chirping call, which attracts the mother. She will take the young in her mouth and carry them down to the water.
“If the baby is having trouble breaking out of its egg, I have even seen mother alligators pick up the egg and gently roll the egg around in her mouth to help release the young,” Kent said. “And then for some months after hatching, the really good moms will hang around with the babies. And if the babies emit a distress call, the mom will swim over and lend a hand.”
It’s not just the American alligators that are innately resilient. Worldwide, alligators and crocodiles are capable of successful comebacks given the right conditions. “If we afford some realistic protection against unregulated harvest,” said Kent, “and we afford them some protection of habitat—nesting habitat, and habitat for juveniles, and wetland habitat for the adults—then we very often see populations of these sometimes highly endangered crocodilians rebound quite rapidly.”
