Ep. 429: Wrastling Gators

done many, this one takes the cake. The MYSTERI Well, we're gonna be exploring the mysterious family of what was it family? H Yeah? Order the order of Crocodilian Crocodilia Yeah, meaning we're gonna focus on the American alligator in the American crocodile sure with Chris Murray of Southeastern Louisiana University also does a lot of like you, also do a lot of little TV stuff. I did some stuff for Animal Plant in a while back. Yanni saw you gator wrestling. Yep,

it happens. Part of the job, dude, I got some gator questions for you. Man, let's do it. I'm gonna stump you with some basics, good studies. Check this out his expertise. Now you got so many things stacked in here. That is it really uh fair to say it's expertise depends on what you're looking at. Well, I'm told I'm looking at comparative morphology yep. Check, physiological ecology check, Eco toxicology check. That's got to be like um um contaminants yep,

building up in animals yep. So eco talk like why how if you eat too much TUNEA, your hands go numb and you can't remember why you called your friend? Exactly like that eco toxic with alligators. Oh so withinligators, they they stored that shit up. Oh yeah, and they're really good at letting us know what's out there in the ecosystem. Yeah, I'll go on evolution. I'll buy that. Biogeography in part philosophy of biology. Oh that's my jam. Yeah,

we could talk about that herpetology. I'll buy that originally from New York City. I have a hard time buying that. And still a drummer in the band called the Clado Jams. I don't know clayto jams yep. I wish that wasn't brought up, but I guess it was Crane put in the notes. Yeah, but you don't know because, as Yannie likes to point out to every single person that walks in the door, you don't get to see the notes that comfortable. I'm so explained it because all of us

would be looking at this document besides you. But then not to worry. It's better that way. Joined it also by Yannis, but tell us Currant of course is here. Wild Phil on the keyboards, and uh we call it a little thing you got down there film just a soundboard sound boy. Yeah, I'll take a wild field though. And Brodie Henderson is here. This is a quick promotion something I didn't even know about until right now. Our guests still doesn't know about because he can't see the notes.

Mark Kenyon's Working for Wildlife Tour, Mark Kenyon, how thanks for letting me know, Buddy Yanni wanted to go. He didn't know about it, Mark Kenyon, says Mark kennyon a very Mark Kenyon from Wired to Hunt. I've put together something called the Working for Wildlife Tour, which is great. That's me editorializing back to Mark to help bring attention to public land volunteer days by way of participating in promoting and documenting six of these events across the country.

So this is people. This is uh, you don't need to be one, but I'm guessing a lot of hunters and anglers and maybe just other folk getting together to do working for wildlife work on public lands. Okay, the first event kicked off in Massachusetts. Over the rest of the year, they got him coming up in Michigan, Idaho, Missouri, Mississippi, and Kentucky. If you want to help out how they're gonna find his link? Rin Okay, you know what, like, can you put it in the notes? Yeah, I'll put it.

I'll put the link in the show notes. But you can also go to the meat Eator website and uh, let's see, you can search yeah, working for wildlife in this in the little search bar on the meat eater dot com. Yeah. So if you're on Spotify right and you go, um, you're looking at media podcasts and you're thinking what you want to listen to, and you see like, oh, that's a clever title. Um. If you keep reading beyond the clever title, you'll find the link too if you

want to participate again. Massachusetts already been mopped up, but Michigan, Idaho, Missouri, Mississippi, and Kentucky public land users getting together to volunteer to do wildlife work on public lands. Also still out, still coming our brand new title Catch Crayfish Coump Stars, available for pre order now ships in June. Again it is enacted.

How many activities are in there, Brodie hundred No, I think it's night around eighty total activities to get kids engaged with involved and educated about the outdoors, educated about hunting and fishing and wildlife, educated about gardening, preparing foods in the home, celestial navigation, making various weapons, everything you need to raise to raise a smart engaged kid who I like to point out has kind of a raw

edge to him. Catch Crayfish Coump Stars. We just found out about some hoser on Amazon selling of fake which I didn't know till this morning is very common um, and I don't even think they go after him. I think they just shut him down. I want to know if you get an actual book or if you just send money and just never see anything. My wife said that one time there was a guy who had somehow printed off and was selling my book, but it was a spiral bound copy of one of my books. He's

just like making him in his kitchen. This guy's name is Oh, well, it's probably not his actual name, Robert G. Burgoyne. Yeah, get his ass him. Yeah, don't buy that one. You know what happened last night. That's how we got a sixty two pound beaver over the weekend. So he had this beaver had I'm not kidding you, in the back of his skull. He had a mushroomed, a perfectly mushroomed twenty two round mushroomed against the back of its skull.

The way mushroomed that dude had to be like got him. Yeah, didn't like just through the high land like land against the skull. I said, I'm gonna save it. It's like, well, I already did save it, perfectly mushroomed lead twenty two round baked against the back of its skull. But was there any cracks in the skull or just the Yeah, nothing, just an annoyance to that big beaver. Yeah, you didn't imagine that dude all day. It was like, I swear

I got him right in the head. Uh. Oh. So to get the book, go on Amazon wherever you buy books. You know, in the old days, you get in trouble for sending people to Amazon because other bookstores to get annoyed. So go wherever you buy books, call your local friendly bookstore. If you have a local bookstore, that'd be a good idea, and tell me you want the book. It releases in June. So we're gon we're gonna talk a lot more about

it and do some stuff. But um, I become intensely interested having three kids in mine, I become intensely interested in making sure I expose them um to the outdoors. And two issues about wildlife management. And if you know, if they grow up and become total city slickers, at least know they got that floating around the back of their head. Uh, Carmen, right, we should we talk to Carmen now man, we had on a quite a few What was that episode called Krin Do you remember when

we had Carmen van Bianchion. It was called Split and Delivered, episode four thirteen. If you go back to the if you go back to the episode called Split and Delivered, Oh, Krann on the point of that beaver with the yep, Um, you know what I say, if I keep I heard about this and I was gonna bring it to you, is have you heard like that? You just take those feet and give them to those big ass back feet from Chew Toys for dogs. No, I had no idea

people do that. There's a lot of gold, but it's like how much better to salt it, preserve it and make like a pendant out of it. Yeah, I had something I was saving for you too. I got anything to give you. I think I gotta right here, Hormett. I'm so excited to see what this is, Steve YETI el Camino bag where there's beaver hats best? Oh no, yeah, okay,

I'll find it. Um, let's get let's get Karmen. Oh. So if you go back to the episode, um, a few episodes back, I'll see an episode called Splitting Delivered in which up top. In that episode we spoke with frequent podcast guests. We've kind of tracked her through her her career. I don't want to say her young career, but yeah, like at her I don't know, I think she's still in her young career. Yeah, it's pretty you know, she's just getting going as a body. Yeah, it's been fun.

So we've had Karmen and I don't know, four or five times as she's gone through like tech positions and now she's very established with Home Range is a home Range Wildlife. She came on the show and she has started with some colleagues or her they started a nonprofit wildlife research organization and they are working on a project where they're studying how links are using burned off landscapes so successional forests coming in after these mega wildfires that

we have in the west. Now, how links use those landscapes? Are those landscapes helpful? The links? Like, what how to links interact with this new emerging ecosystem out there that's coming in the back end of fires. But one of the big things befuddling their efforts to get some links Radio Collared was having a bunch of snowmobiles that were like older than Carmen. Carmen came on the show and she had put together a way to help her nonprofit raise money for snowmobiles. And my god, did you guys

um really come forth in a huge way. Carmen's embarrassed to admit how much money they raised. Yeah, let's get it on the line. Let's get it on the line. And we're just gonna do a quick quick check in because they've been they've been whacking the links you. I don't think you say that when your radio collar. Probably not a good way to put it, all right, Carmons. So you guys, since you, since you've been on, you and your colleagues at Home Range Wildlife have gotten three links. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

and you're trying to get you're trying to get four. Well, that would be amazing because we've got four collars, but we've already, um one was my goal, So to have three is just awesome. We're already now because really one collar left, we've got a hole more night so their traps open that. Well, we'll try for a miracle to get all four out, but otherwise we'll be you know, getting more callers for next year. And so everything now

is just sort of a cherry on top. What's the farthest that one of those links as strayed from the capture site yet? Oh? I haven't measured that, but not very far, not going very far, yeah, which is kind of cool. I mean totally anecdotal at this point. But um, and this, you know, my thinking may change down the road as we learn more. But one thing people have feared is that because they're living in what's a regenerating burn that they in theory might have really large home

ranges because the habitat quality could be poor. So to see that they're not covering a whole lot of ground could be a good sign that the habitats richer than people have supposed got it. And then you can you give us quick so that we'll be update like where you guys are at on snow and bills. Oh man, we're in a good spot. So we have since that since we were on we got a nice twenty twenty one uh Polaris that has been doing really well. And then we also were able to purchase two brand new

Scudo expeditions that have just been awesome. And we've already put almost two thousand miles on those brand new sleds. Really well. Oh yeah, we're going at least fifty miles a day, sometimes one hundred, So damn really do a lot of writing. Yeah, oh yeah, man, I want to switch jobs. Man. Then uh, you guys, you guys got to do trailer for him too. We gotta do trailer and enclosed trailer, which for where we live that there

are tons of mormots, uh and mice and stuff. That's gonna be really nice for in the summer for storing them. So we feel like we've protected our investment. And yeah, we're feeling pretty pimped out. That is great. I appreciate the check in. I know that, man, I had a lot of friends after you came out. I had a lot of friends text me their little receipt things from having participated in the from having participated in the adopted

set thing. And I know that I've been dealing with Ford Well krimsmen deal with forward over at first Light to get the winners set up with their cold weather gear, of their cold weather collection of First Light gear. So I appreciate it coming back on and check and then was I'm glad you guys got the snow bill problem taken care of, and I hope you catch the fourth links. Thanks well, we just appreciate so much you and your listeners. The outpouring has been incredible, so I just want to

thank everybody for your support. It's been super fun. I got one request for our you don't need to print it, but can you make us for our podcast studio a graphic that has all the lines running around when you eventually look at all the data. That's cool. Oh yeah, that'd be awesome, Like, so a different color for each link and show how they're zooming around. Yeah yeah, I'd like that. Um yeah, and then when one dies, you're gonna go find out what happened to it, right, yep? Yeah,

I want the skull off that links. Is that possible? Tell you what. That's one of the skulls that I don't have in my collection, So we might have to fight. Well, I have the second one. I'm not wishing. I'm not like wishing ill upon your links, you know. I hope they have. I hope they die old age someday. Oh hey, I gotta tell you. I gotta tell you a tip, and then then I'm gonna let you go. All right.

We had that bobcat at that Bobcat expert on Mrcer Longing, and I think that you later had some communication with Mercer about because he's he's he does a lot of cage he catches bobcats for research and also the fur markets. He the other day told me about how they were out doing the telemetry. I think they still do that. Oh yeah, telemetry on a Bobcat and they lost the signal and he thought it must have went into a

cave or something. So he started wailing on a predator calling Alsen got the signal back huh, Like he pulled it out, he drew it, and he drew it out of his spot enough to pick the signal back up. All right, send me that post. Yeah, you don't need to print it. We'll print it, but send me my poster and at school. All right, thank you very much. You're welcome back on the show anytime. All right, Mike

m see you guys. Thank you everybody so much. Okay, Uh, speaking of capturing and collar and stuff, this is a crazy story. So they just got the first ever wolverine captured, collared, and released in Utah. So basically, like, um, I don't know if Cowwell Print did her math on this. She

thinks it was. Basically, while we were recording our wolverine episode with with Rebecca Waters Waters wols Waters, a wolverine was seen in Utah, Okay, only the eighth confirmed sighting in the state of Utah since nineteen seventy nine, the first one ever captured biologists in Utah. This thing had had a busy morning. He had killed how many sheep? I think it was it eighteen? This guy killed this wolverine comes in and kills eighteen sheep in a morning.

What's the term for that, when a predator goes surplus killer? Yea wait, let me make sure I didn't make a mistake. Yeah, eighteen. What to ask the croc guy if they do surplus killer, if gatters do surplus killing crocs and gators, let's ask him right now, right now. You know what surplus killing is, killing more than you can eat. They get a little carried away. Yeah, they're getting a pen full of llamas

like a mountain lion. It's always it's always domestic animals. Yeah, I don't really see that at all in alligators and crocodiles. I mean, they pretty much have a hard enough time eating what they actually are able to acquire. Shrimp and stuff. I mean they eat a lot of those, but if they grab a hole to something pretty big, it takes them a long time to actually, you know, actually do

anything with that meal. Like a deer, So if he kills killing, if he kills a deer and he stashes it and another deer shows up, he's not gonna grab that one and stash it too. Probably not. I mean, they'll typically like launch at a deer from the water's edge, and they'll stick it in the water and then stick it under a log under the water until the meat gets a little bit a little bit easier, and then

have a snack for a month or two. They blow a lot of energy killing one large thing, tons of ends, so they can't kill another one, you know, right, Yeah, so this guy. So they go in there, they want to catch it, put a collar on it. They're going to clean up all the dead sheep. Then they set two barrel traps with hind quarters and later catch the wolverine. Where where where was this? Randolph? Utah? Jannat used to live in Utah? Where's that? Never heard of ring in

rich County. I don't know where that is. Oh they even they brought it out of the wild and into a yea lab of sorts and to do the study, do the work up. Three to four years old, twenty eight pounds, forty one inches. Tip of nose, the tip of tail forty one's big. Because Rebecca, I remember, he's

writing line, he's writing line, He's cute. After the um, after the aired, I had a lot of friends sending me like um pictures of wolverines that they are in the news or that they found or their buddy found. And then I'd be like, what's up with that? He goes, well, that was eight years ago. I'm like, oh, okay, cold, it's cold trail now Randolph looks like it's about eighty ish miles northeast of Salt Lake City. Thanks Phil. So that's pretty cool and interesting. Um, okay, this is the

absolute final word. Krin thinks it's perhaps the final word. It's the final word. That's the final word. I'd refried beans. I grew up, someone wrote in He says he's got a potentially controversial take on the whole subject. He grew up in New Mexico, but spent a lot of time living in Chile. I'm thinking about switching. Switching what well, I went from Iran to Iran. Oh, it's on. I'm thinking about going from Chile to Chile. A matter of fact, you already made the transition. A matter of fact that

had I was doing one of my old books. I was doing a new audio because we got the audio rights back one of my old books at the ten year mark, and I had to do it. And I did Chile sound a little pretentious, but um, spend some time living in Chile. Not being a native Spanish speaker, I learned to speak fluently when living in South America. I believe this issue is more of a translation issue. The word in Mexican Spanish is frijoles rifritos or in

Chilan Spanish pirotos rifritos. Am I doing semi good? Yeah? The issue is The issue is the suffix re. In English, this suffix means to fry again. It would be taken to be fry again refried. But in Spanish this suffix can mean very fried. You can add this to any word in Spanish, such as beating a dead horse. Like this topic, what would be goan Yanni Cabio. I don't know if this is true, but when I hear refried beans, I hear very fried beans. I don't know. I wish

I would need to read that. I'll buy it. You don't not really, I think it makes sense very fried beans. It might. I'm bad I read it guys in Texas. Now, uh, I wanted to talk about this for like an hour. Come on, let's just jump in and get it over with. You want, okay? Yeah, it's an old story. Now it's getting old. Kansas bans trail cams on public land. I own trail cams. I like trail cams. I as we speak, have a trail cam on public land in a place that I'm gonna visit. I put it and I'm gonna

go on the one year mark and retrieve it. Last time I did as I had forgot to turn it on all winter. I'll wonder I'd rolled my wife not talking about going up getting my camera. I got in the coolest spot. I'm like, man, can you wait to go and get my camera. It's gonna be amazing all the ships on my camera. Now I go up there, I'm like, dah, hadn't turn it on. Batries are still good. Now wait a minute. In Montana, can you have him out on public land? You can't transmit a signal? Oh?

I thought you couldn't have him out on public land during big games? No, I think they can't. If that's the case, I'm in violation. I could be making that up in my head, but I think you can't have any of that transmits a signal. You're talking the wrong person. You're waiting to cut this out, and I'm minded to go take my camera down. Yeah, it sounds like it. For a while there's no trail cam use then it

became no trail cams that transmit a signal. I thought there was a during big game season component to it. I could be wrong, Yeah, but it seems it's changed every year. You can't use one that transmits a signal in any capacity toward using it to cat to process taking game. That's the case. I'm gonna call a pancrats and turn myself in. It's just thinking about calling him. Oh, back to Kansas. I don't think that's true. Is it true? Well, we should find out. Jesus. There's not even a place

I would hunt. I'm see you guys ever using for gators. Yeah, we do, actually, especially around alligator nests and stuff like that. Yeah, but I have no idea regarding the legalities of that where well, I'm sure for research purposes worry about it. Yeah, Okay, here's the semi headline or not not, I mean, like the one liner. The one liner is this. With a unanimous vote by its Game Commission, Kansas becomes the first Midwestern white tail state to impose a year round dam

trull camera ban. So what was Arizonas was only partial only during well. Arizonas in Utahs was public private this they did it for private land too. Oh. I called a friend of mine. I don't want to say his name because I didn't ask me if I could say his name. I call a friend of mine who like, he does a lot of scouting for outfitters, and he finds a lot of animals, you know. And I said, I said, man, what's your take on it? He goes, I love it. I go, you like the trail cam bam,

love it. He said, I'm a dinosaur. I've been in this business a long time. I've been this game a long time, and glassing, looking for tracks, looking for sheds. That's where I excel because it goes. That's how I was brought up. I learned my I learned my abilities being in the woods. Yeah, I fall on that, and he goes, and I got into it like I got into it. But for me, I think it's great. And he said, too, he saw what places like the Arizona strip.

He thinks you're gonna have it's gonna This is him speaking and like him guessing, you're gonna have an improvement of an age class box because he thinks it's gonna go back to being there's bucks people don't know about, because he said in the in these areas, like where he's at, he said, it's different. He goes where you're at, there's a lot of water. He's come about Montana. There's a lot of water here. Water is the thing. Okay, all big game goes to water, and there's a finite

place for them to find water. So when you get in the late summer, okay or whatever, the dry dry seas probably that late summer, but but pre mon soon when you go out, you're like, any deer is gonna go here, here or here. Yeah, and with cameras and and everybody knows about every deer. So he's he's optimistic that it's gonna be that there's more dear slipping through the cracks and it's going back to being like that the woodsmen find the deer and it's not and it's

not a tech game. He knew a guy, he knew a guy that was running over one hundred cameras. Oh yeah, and that's common. I don't I don't think that one hundred cameras is out of the ordinary. He had two guys he talked about an outfitter that had two guys on payroll that only ran cameras in searching for searching for stuff for clients. Yeah. I like the mystery of it all. So Kansas on public land there is like, this is the thing I've become aware of in places.

It just kind of depends. We were in a place in Florida where it was like it was like being at seven to eleven for the amount of cameras aimed at you on public land. Oh yeah, yeah, I could see it becoming. Um, people that don't want to be surveiled in photographed and do you have a sort of like expectation of privacy. But in these areas where like all the roads, all the trails are done, it like I could see that it would get on people's nerves. Oh yeah. Um. And like I said, man, I like like,

if it became that you couldn't, I wouldn't. Right, If you couldn't, I wouldn't, But I I did. It's fun using them. But I'm empathetic of the situation and the fact that all unanimous vote no. It'll generate some hate mail because I think people will say, well, you guys get to hunt wherever you want to hunt, you're always hunting some fancy private ranch and you don't need to scout. And I'm a working man. I need these cameras to scout. But it's we hunt a lot of public land and

that hunt. By having all those cameras that we had to walk by every single day multiple times, it changed the experience. Yeah, then people are like sending you messages telling you finding you and on social like Yani, people sending him messages on social being like I know where you're at. That's ridiculous. Yeah, is this you, guys? Which is that? That part? Like, I don't mind the person reaching out. I try to answer to all the dms

on Instagram. That part's fine, But the experience of being out there hunting, like I like to go into the woods to be alone and be quiet and not have I think another concerned people have about these kind of laws too, is that they're coming from these UH commissions that are appointed members and perhaps some of their like there might be a non hunting angle coming from some of those commissioners, Like I've heard that in places too, like the more he can restrict use, the more here

restricting hunters. You know, So three percent of Kansas is public. Okay, here's an interesting thing. Here's what one of the commissioners had to say. He said, So this is where he's going on. He's not going on. He's not he This commissioner is not speaking of the issue on a fair chase, fair take. Okay, like unfair advantage. That's not where he's going with it. Commissioner Gerald Lauber said that trail cameras cause privacy issues and give rise to conflict when used

on heavily trafficed public land in Kansas. He didn't say that. Here's what he says. Quote, there are some deliterious issues when it comes to trail cameras. In some places, cameras are used to spy on other hunters, and some people recoil from seeing a camera. They're private, they don't want to have somebody take their picture and then have it

on Facebook, which absolutely happens. Lawber went on to say that trail cameras were sometimes used by hunters as a means of staking claim to a particular section of public land. Bubbly Dougs got all kinds of thoughts about the whole thing. I can't I'll have to get back to. It's so much I have to. I have to dig into it, say about it. You can get mad at me, Oh you want I'm out on the Kansas Game Commission. Sure, I was reporting the facts. Dude, it's the thing I see.

I see both sides. I see both sides to it. As a camera owner, I like cameras. I have a subscription m I like to putting them on beaver dams to see what all goes over the beaver dam. I like everything about them. If there was a thing where you couldn't use them, I just I don't know. I'd be like, yeah, I understand, it's not something you know what it is. It's not something. It's not something I

would take up. It's not something I would take up the fight about because you can imagine, like it's easy to imagine the extreme, where the extreme being you can't walk down a trail without being photographed, which is probably the case in many places that you can't go down a path without being photographed. The guy I was talking about, I wish I could. I should have checked with them to talk about him. He said, Now every camera you find an Arizona's got a bullet hole through it. Now

they're illegal people to shoot him. He said, there's still ones. Just got a band it out in the woods, but they all been shot by pistols. Wow, think about that. Hardcore. Okay, we're ready to dig in on gators, dude. I got some questions about gators. But first I want to tell you something. Do you hear about this that the Texas Zoo rescues an alligator that was stolen as an egg twenty years ago? Yeah? I did hear something about this on social media. I don't know the full story though

a Texas Zoo. This is reported in the Guardian. I'm the lukewarm on the Guardian sometimes I like it. A Texas zoo said it had taken back an eight foot alligator which was stolen as an egg more than twenty years ago, then kept as a backyard pet. I mean, this is this is from Texas Parking Wildlife. A woman confessed to taking an egg from Animal World and Snake Farm Zoo near Austin. It's just a non on her

for twenty for twenty that is heartbreaking. She was a volunteer at Animal Farm way back then twenty years ago, apparently stole the alligator as an egg. She put in her pocket. That's heartbreaking, heartbreaking. It's actually kind of hard to do. I can an alligator egg. It can't roll one way or another, or the embryo will die. Is that right? So she had to know what she was doing. She put her an alligator egg and incubate it long enough for it to hatch successfully. That's pretty hard to do.

Maybe she learned that at the Zoo Disney movie about this lady. It's twenty years and they took it back. Is it a mature gator at that? Oh? Yeah, eight foot alligator is mature. And I could see an eight foot alligator being twenty years old, especially in captivity. Talk about being able to see two sides of a story. I could see him one the alligator bag for twenty years. It's like losing a leg. She faces misdemeanor charges for a legal possession of an egg and possession of an

alligator without a permit. I mean, I get it, I get it, But but misdemeanor. Though I get it. We think about that film. You shouldn't have done it. I don't know, Okay, picture it. You shouldn't have done it, Okay, shouldn't have done it? Everybody knows that sure, does there any little part in the back of your head be like, oh, it's like losing a leg. Well, maybe she hated that alligator. I don't know. It looks like she took pretty good care of it. Twenty years. She's had that pet a

lot of a lot of chickens and rats. Imagine, huh. And if she stole it as an egg, so it's like what you think, like it bonded to her. I'll take that to our guests. I have seen alligators in that are pretty well trained, So I would imagine that she would have a pretty strong emotional attachment to that animal. I'm not sure about the opposite. So he's not crying, he's not crying crocodile's years. Probably not, But would would

he be when he goes back to the zoo. Is he going to be completely thrown off and out of his element now? Or gosh? I think that's tough With all crocodilians, I mean, I think they're they're really good at just sort of surviving in whatever enclosure they're in until they're no longer surviving, you know, like it'll be fine, I would imagine, But what about her? That's a different. You see, like hate New Jersey cat laters ladies, but

he loved Texas ladies. Listen, if you said you can spend a weekend or the New Jersey Cat lady or a Texas gator lady, what do you say? Okay, when you put it that way. Now, I know you don't like doing this very much, Krim, but can you please get her on the show for a calling? Just a calling? Okay, it's not that I don't like doing it. I'll tell her. I said that. I know it was bad what she did, and we all know what she did was bad, but we just want to hear about how tore up she is. Okay,

all right, and like what she fed it? Okay, Um, I want to go back at the beginning on gators and crocks in America. But first I want to I got to clear something up which I can't stop thinking about and talking about. I had occasion, Yannie and I drew um some pretty sweet Wildlife Management Area turkey tags in Florida this year. But I was down a few days early and I did a little tour on some public land right up against Everglades or up against the National Park. Okay, okay, So I went out the guy

that has one of them big buggies. You know, the ground was dry, but we took a swamp buggy, but you could have driven into golf court golf cart. We did with a little swamp buggy tour just for gets some higgles, okay, and um in Big Cypress cool, yeah, dry as a bone. Okay, there was a canal that had water, but prior to it becoming um, prior to becoming like Big Cypress, it had been at various times grazed by cattle and people had had little homesteads out there.

So some of the areas out in Big Cyper, she'll run into groves okay, like they'll be like fruit trees planted. Um, you'll see like rusted old chunks of fence, you know, hog fences like people would just kind of live and yeah, probably squashed any of those. Any that fruit that you saw hanging, We didn't find anything that was any fruit that was fruiting except for sour oranges. We're trying that bad like like some native but to see that wasn't even like native citrus. But it was in this area,

so maybe someone would have just cultivated it there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I found grapefruit and those oranges, and it kind of it might have been passed due, but yeah, they were kind of just I don't want to say it, not merely but grainy. Just yeah, a lot of That's what I had was like that. Yeah, I mean you could eat it, but it wasn't as you know, you've just

been trained up one on our sweet oranges. So at a time, someone had developed water holes for cattle, okay, And so when you're cruising around, everything's like dry as a bone. It gets wet sometimes but not right now. It's dry as a bone, and you'll see these dirt tanks and you could even see like where years ago someone had mounted all the dirt up so they'd be like a berm or an impoundment. In some water holes that I'm not shipping you are not that much bigger

than this podcast studio. Okay, but there's some eight foot alligator ly in there. Yeah, I'm not surprised at all. The hell is he eating? Like, what is he doing? Probably just hanging out in water until there's a lot more of it. I mean, alligators a lot of research on alligators being really good ecosystem engineers. So when the water goes away, they will dig out a hole like that themselves that allow a lot of water or to

be there for other wildlife to come and utilize. Really, so they can do that themselves and do every year. But how long can he wait before, like presumably he's sitting there thinking someday someone's gonna come get a drink yep, exactly, and I'm gonna smack it yep. And it happens all the time. But how long can it not happen before he's got a split? Yeah, Well, I don't think there's anywhere else to go, you know, for them. But I'll

give you an example. So in Costa Rica, American crocodiles will estivate during the dry season and bury themselves under the mud for estivates, like try to avoid dying from lack of water or heat. Right, So, like sometimes they'll go into the woods. We don't actually know what they do in the woods. Sometimes they'll go in like these little limestone cave things, and sometimes they'll just let the mud harden over top of them, and you can be

walking around they'll be under your feet. You can't see them, but they'll stay there for a couple months before the wet season returns in like early to mid May, not even a chance to eat, not a chance to eat, just hanging out waiting, So that alligator probably has a pretty good shot at being successful for however long it has to be there. The guy was with told me that he's got I can't remember what he called him caves or dens. What was he calling them? Probably wallows.

He's dug out the alligator holes. Yeah, they I mean, they'll do that themselves. Talk about what that is alligator holes? Really you only see that down in South Florida where there's times of the year where there's lack of water, and there's been a lot of research on the utility of alligator holes. But they'll essentially dig out a hole that is, yeah, no bigger than this room we're in right now, and allow themselves to hang out there in water for months. And other animals need to utilize those

holes as well. So that's well, he's I thought he's talking about like a like a little deep cave area. He does, that's a walloway. The alligators will dig wallows like in the sides of those holes. Yeah, and they'll just go hang out in there underground, um for a long time. How are they digging? Mm? They use it all. They'll use their head, they'll use their front limbs and

just make a big hole. In fact, I don't think we have a lot of footage on them making those alligator wallows, which would be really cool footage to get, but I guess not in Kansas because there's no cameras allowed. Yeah, well, the private land gators, those are the spoiled gators. They got it made. But like every time you see an alligator nest, you'll see the nest up top and then on the edge nearest the water, you'll see a hole. And mom usually is sitting in that hole or outside

of that hole by her nest. If she's a good mom. Got it. I want to go back to the beginning on gators. We should go back at the beginning on YouTube. How um you grew up in New York. Grew up in New York, New Rochelle, New York. Turned nine there, I think, spend a year in England. My dad was a high school art teacher. Moved back to New York. Moved to Connecticut to play high school baseball. That didn't

pan out very well. I'm a biologist, not a baseball player. Now, but you wanted to be a full time baseball I wanted to be a baseball player. I'm just not good at baseball. It's the problem. Yeah, I could get in the way. Yeah, it's a hardship I couldn't overcome. How'd you get interested in I like living there where they don't have them? How'd you get interested in them? Steve Irwin watching the Steve Rwin Animal Planet when I was a kid with my neighbor, we would I just got hooked.

We'd watch it every week and we actually we actually bought one of those VHS recorders from a tag sail and I would pretend to be Steve Irwin in the backyard with toads and snakes and stuff like that. Yeah, and it went down the whole it up. I never watched them. Wow, look at this is he the guy that had that tragic death where he got hit by a stingray right through the heart. Is true? But yeah, we would, uh make little home videos and then he actually did a senior project when he was a senior

in high school. My buddy, my neighbor, No, I don't know, I don't know if he did uh where we went down to South Florida and went to a wildlife refuge and alligator farm, and we made a video there for his senior project, and uh, that got me in touch with sort of the more hands on aspect of working with these animals. And I said to myself, I want to work here. And then having worked there for a while, I learned that this could be a real job for me.

So I went to college. And before that, like, when you were a kid, did you have like an affinity for going out and catching like garter snakes and fro Yeah, in Connecticut, I mean I would catch everything I get my hands on. Me and my neighbor frogs and milk snakes and hog no snakes and everything. I think it's just something that is in people. You gotta go catch stuff called it's called worrying wildlife. Yeah, I mean kids used to do it all the time. Now their parents

don't let them. Now they do it on an iPad. They worry wildlife on an iPad. My kid does. He likes to sund them stupid hunting video games drives um. And then he studied what would you study general biology and undergrad then went on for a master's degree at Southeastern Louisiana University where I am now, and I focused on My advisor was an evolutionary biologist, but I did

not focus on evolutionary biology at all. I focused on the effects of stress on the reproductive output of American alligators in Louisiana in Texas, and I was there at a community time because the oil spill occurred, and so I was able to look at how the oil spill affected the stress of alligators as well, how the actual oil or how the activity around the cleanup. What were you looking at. Well, that's a tough thing to separate.

So there was this like dispersing stuff that was put out because in eco toxicology, if it's out of sight, it's out of mind kind of thing. Um, So it was sort of a combination of just looking at the entire scenario, either oil in the marsh I was working in in southeast Louisiana or the dispersing stuff that was used. Turns out large alligators just leave and small alligators stay and get really stressed out. So the disperse it was meant to to make it the alligators want to split.

It's hard to tell if it was the oil or the dispersing what like, what do you what is dispersing? Yeah, so it's this uh, it's this chemical they put out in oil spills. I don't know much about it from that's the oil from like getting together with other oil molecules. So I thought you meant they were putting something out to try to drive to disperse animals, to try to get gators to move away from the oil spill. It's oil spill clean up tactic. I believe I got you.

So the impacts of that and the little ones to stay get stressed out? Was it impactful on them? Yeah, they get pretty stressed out, it turns out, which was obviously expected. But larger ones just leave and the results to get it and stressed out or what like loss of weight, slower grow Like, yeah, that's an interesting question. I think that the results are getting stressed out. Are

you know a lot of physiological things. You know, you can't allocate a lot of energy to your immune system when you're stressed out, so you're more susceptible to the environmental problems that are already in your face that alligators can pretty well handle when they're not stressed out. When you I would say that most Americans do not know that there's a crocodile in America, American crocodile South Florida. How many of them? Like, I mean, did they used

to be pretty thick? Did they used to be that they were eating people and stuff all the time, like African crocodiles in the Nile or whatever. Yeah, I don't. I don't really think that they ever became a human crocodile conflict issue in South Florida. I mean, I think they are now because there's just so many people in such little space. But there's a great book that recently came out, maybe five or sixty years ago, that talks

about the Spanish when they settled South Florida. Yeah, they would talk about it and talking about just how many alligators there were, And specifically there's mentioned like on the what would it be southwest side of Florida towards like Santa Belle Island, how many American crocodiles there were, lay out the difference between an alligator and a crocodile. So, okay, are you ready for this? This is a question that people ask a lot, and it's not easy for a

crocodile biologist to answer, because you guys like to everything. Yeah, we're terrible. But the issue is that there's like sixteen species of crocodile globally globally, and there's eight species of ALLIGATORI including Cayman. So to say, what's the differ between an alligator and a crocodile, It's a difficult situation. It's a difficult thing to answer between much variation. Let's do it.

Let's stick to the American alligator in the American crocodile. Okay, and let's stick to from from a layman observer's perspective. Gotcha like, meaning, you're hanging out on vacation in Florida and you see a crocodile alligator esque creature and you say to yourself, I wonder if that's a gator or a croc Sure, what are you looking at? I'm looking at a couple of things. The shape of the snout

is sort of the obvious answer. Alligators have a more rounded snout and the American croc is going to have a more narrow, longer pointed snout. But I'm also looking at other things, like where is it an estuarine environment? If so, I'm leaning towards an American crocodile is it in the Everglades or Big Cypress National Preserve or somewhere more where there is no salt intrusion that'll lead towards an American alligator in that scenario. But they're pretty easy

to tell just by looking at them. So could they, like, could the American crocodile just head out into open salt water? Yes, there's one or two species of crocodile, the saltwater crocodile hence the name, and the American croc that readily enter marine environments and disperse from islands to other places throughout the ocean. So it's feasible that you could be out in the ocean ten miles offshore or something, and here

comes a crocodiles going by in Costriaca. That happens all the time to surfers and other people out there, especially on the Pacific coast. Just see them. Yeah, there's out there, look like logs on the top of the water. Then go under and then you get off your board. Are they hunting? What are they doing out there? I think for yeah, I mean they're they're eating out there, you know.

I think a lot of people like to think of crocodilians in general is eating large animals, right, sure, But I think you know, what we know from a lot of really good research in South Louisiana and Southeast Texas is that alligators eat a lot of blue crab. And we know that American crocs are eating a ton of shrimp when they can really so yeah, So I think like, like, how in the hell are they doing that? They just go out and open their mouths and swim and shrimp

goes near them. In fact, I saw a video. I saw video last night on social media of a crocodile using its tail to flick shrimp up in the air and they were landing in his mouth. It was awesome. I'll try to find that video for you. Wow. The crocs like in Costa Rica, the ones that get real big, same exacts sees as the one in South Florida. Yes, how come the ones in South Florida don't get big?

They get pretty big, do they? Oh? Yeah? South Florida is a is a tricky scenario in terms of American crocs because there's so much there's there's so little habitat and so much attention paid because they're the only American croc. As you say, in the commental US or in the

US in general. So the numbers are pretty low. So they're sort of a high conservation concern, and there's really been a really good effort to monitor populations in particular successful nesting events, sort of in collaboration with land use down there. Um, a lot of folks at like University of Florida have spent long time studying those populations, like how many are there, how many were there, and how many are there? It's hard to say how many there were.

I want to make an educated guests and say more. But I would say right now, I think a colleague might correct me. But I would say a thousand American crocs in South Florida would be a generally good ballpark. And they can at times be intermixed with alligators, yeah, especially way down in South Florida. Like if you go down to like nine Mile Pond Flamingo way down there in never Glades National Park, you'll be in water bodies where you can see them both and they can be

fourteen feet crocs. Yeah, I mean alligators Cuba eating shrimp eating crabs. I like to think of them eating wild fish. I know that's the cool stuff. Oh yeah, man, like doing crazy stuff. I mean, really, whatever swims near their mouth, they're gonna try to eat. You know, when I was down there, I was with Clay Nor, my colleague, Clay Nucam, and he was saying, Man, if you came to me and said, um, you have to go get attacked by a bear, he said, it'd actually be hard to get

attacked by a bear. There's actually a movie about this where a guy got mauled by a grizzly. Then he built a grizzlyproof suit. He couldn't get mauled again. He tried his ass off to get mauled again in his grizzlyproof suit, but could never get mauled again. So Clay's like, you couldn't. If you said to go get mauled, you probably are going to fail. But he said, I feel like he doesn't know. He doesn't live in gator country.

He said, you know, I'm far from gator No. He said, I feel like if you told me I had to get mauled by a gator, I'd be able to figure it out. Yeah, that's definitely the possibility. I mean, I think that's a lot easier. So because yeah, we're because we don't We don't know because we're not familiar with him. But we thought, like, how would you not go to that little pond where you know that some bitches in there and just stick your foot in there and wiggle

it around. How's he not gonna want to bite it? Well, he might be afraid, you know. I think the easiest thing to do is to make yourself look like you're the size of a manageable prey item. That's what happens when you see all these media reports of stuff getting eaten, is that they're usually in the water part way, or the size of a small dog or something like that. So I would go to the pond and I would kneel at the water's edge. You're trying to get my waist,

kneel down. Look small at night. Then you'd have a good chance and you can pull it off. Have you ever been have you ever been part of like an investigation of an attack at all? Done anywhere without going into too much detail. Yes, but we'll say, okay, let's do the version where you do go into detail. I mean, there's been a situation. Things off, Please my teacher. I'm not joking, man, I don't know if she's still alive or not. I don't I don't want to say her name.

I can tell you that she lived on the Mosquegan River. I don't want to say her name. She might have to look at so she's passed away or not. My fifth grade teacher was in the Peace Corps in Africa, and I think she got reprimanded for this. She brought us photographs into school and showed in school photographs of the remains of her boyfriend who has recovered from the belly of a crocodile and at whoam yikes? So you now you go? Now I go. Now you tell us

what you're talking about. Well, I just spilled the beans, you know. I think when there's human crocodile conflict in the population that involves a population of animals that a particular researcher works in, they like to get as much information as they can on who or which animal they think was responsible for the attacks understood, and I have been inquired about who is involved. The problem is it's

an impossible thing to answer. Oh, someone want to know which of the gators that you might be looking at, and what could they tell about its behaviors and whatnot? Yeah, do I have any ideas on if which alligator may have done this bad. Yeah, it's like when they try to go after the rogue shark or whatever. Right, yeah, right, And I find that a little bit ridiculous. I mean, if it's in a scenario where there's an alligator in a communal pond in Florida and that's where somebody went missing,

well it was that alligator, that's an easy one. But if it's somebody swimming off the coast of Florida and somebody goes missing, then how are you supposed to know which animals responsible? Right? Usually the management tactic is to go out and see if there's a size animal that could have been responsible. But in most scenarios, like way out in the wild, it's that's an impossible thing too to know. Every year, man, I'll get back to the history stuff. And now we're on this subject. I want

to go with it. And and I know that you're a good person asks because you're not gonna want to sensationalize stuff because you're you're you're dealing in facts and you you know gather you liked the animals, I do very much, so you don't want to sensationalize this. But I'll say this and the Okay, in the lower forty eight, every year grizzly bears kill zero, one, two, or three. People's never more than two or three. Sometimes there's none.

Usually there's one. Okay, where are we at with alligators? Alligators and crocodiles in America? Like about the same? Right? Yeah, gosh, I don't know in recent years of reported crocodile attack, Okay, so that's not even a thing. I mean, maybe even one every five years. God, as an educated guest, it's like I would declare that not a thing. Not a thing.

I would also agree, Yeah, alligators, I think, I mean, I would say, annually we hear about some new story where there was an alligator attack, right, but we don't hear about it fifty times a year. We hear about it one, two, or three, So it remains almost in the category of not a thing. I yeah, I think. So when you're an alligator country, are there are there things that you just don't do make yourself the size of a prey item at the water's edge, and that

becomes like a widely known thing. No, otherwise it wouldn't happen. I mean I think that, you know, let's say, we're at these ponds, okay, and I had my kids with me, which could totally happen. And when my kids getting near a pond, what do they want to do? They want to go throw shit in the pond. Yeah, okay, so they're down. Yeah, they're down throwing shit in the pond, falling into the pond. Um would you are you hysterical to be like, don't do that? Or is that reasonable

to be like that? I would say you can throw stuff in the pond, because that's the urge that everyone has, But don't go down to the water if you're a kid, hmm, I mean, just don't. Why risk it? And you're not you don't rate yourself a paranoid person, No, I don't. I wouldn't say why. Or so getting bit by getting killed by an alligator resides somewhere into like the not a thing thing. But they're hell on dogs or that is that like a thing? That is that overblown? And

you know, I mean they are hell on dogs. I think that most of the time. Like there was a couple videos recently where the dog got attacked and the owner went to save the dog, and I think that leads to a lot of this stuff um. When they're walking their dog near a pond, those dogs have the same inclination to go to the water's and then alligator says, ooh, a prey size organism. I'm gonna eat that, and the

owner says, no, you're not. And then that leads to an issue between the alligator and the owner because he's in there trying to do because they're trying to save their dog, which I get as well. So my suggestion is, don't walk your dogs near the water's edge if you know that there's an alligator in that pond, or even if you don't, if you're if you're not sure, don't

do it. Name for me all the junk you've heard of him eating, because it's a crazy list, right, Okay, Yeah, so we've we opened up thirteen big harvest the alligators stomachs um from a kind of a unique habits at a reservoir in Alabama on the Chattahoochee River, and we found the alligators thirteen fourteen feet damn big and they stunk. Man,

But we found they stunk just the animal stunt. No, when you open that gut, I mean stuff's been there, a wild rotten it's the worst smell I've ever smelled, and I can smell it to this day if I try hard enough. It was all experience. We covered that. Yeah, I like the leading source on day this podcast is a leading source of information on DEA. Who yeah, I mean, we found so much stuff in those guts. Particularly, we found fish scales from stuff like alligator gar along noose gar,

spotted gar. We found an entire h hog parts all in there, turtle scoots from alligator snappers, which is a hard thing to eat, really, snake vertebrae like the carrotonized plates on top of the show. Uh. And then the coolest thing we found was a fawn that looked like

it was a sleep in the gut. It was about oh man, that big, and it was just sitting dog like it was a sleep, Like he was gonna get around to digesting it at some point exactly eventually that thing was going to pass through, but not that day. How long had they been in there, Oh, I don't know, it was it was incredibly intact, so I would say not long. But he also found a lot of man made stuff in there, a lot of shell casings in there, and bullets. I don't know. It's shiny stuff. Yeah, a

lot of shiny stuff. And I still don't know if the alligator had eaten things that had been shot, or if people were shooting at the alligator and it didn't die. Are the bullets deformed or the bullets in their original state like pre firing, original date, not mushroomed like on the on the beaver skull or anything. But if so you saw, we've found it all, you know, I mean, like he's just eating the eating stuff. Yeah, but then you found also just the projectile, the bullets not not

mushroomed like a lot of them. I also could imagine that it's like, yeah, I wonder if that's picking up Like a lot of times, if they're trying to eat something off the bottom, they'll get a lot of other stuff in their mouth. So they're probably about the one that had some Indian arrowheads in it, remember that eating so much garbage off the bottom. He actually inadvertently, assumably assuming he inadvertently picked up type that in Crinton type

in alligator arrowhead was flint arrowhead. I forget where that was. Yeah, go on, well that's that's really awesome. Do you know, but the bullets, do you have pictures of the bullets. No, I mean this was this was twenty twenty eleven, twenty twelve. Got it around then Mississippi, Mississippi read that this might tickle your fancy. The title is out. This is CNN. Just so happens. Alligators eat lots of things. These prehistoric

artifacts were an unusual snack. So this was a Mississippi gator in well, the guy who found found it was based in Yazoo City, Mississippi. But he found yeah, part of uh like the base part of an arrowhead, and then some other kind of like uh like an adiladdle dark point. Yeah, they're like a like a counterbalance to an adiladdle. I don't think if I remember. So when when he picks that junk up, what's he doing? He just inadvertently getting it while he grabs other stuff. Yeah,

i'd imagine. So, like, have you ever seen an alligator attempt to eat something off the bottom. They're horrible at it. They just sort of turn their head and kind of rub on the bottom and anything that's in their mouth they'll lift their head up and might go down. Is it just like like a shovel basically? I mean it's yeah, like a like you were to take two shovels try to use them as a tool to lift something up off the table, you know, and they're and you're really

bad at it. So so's the alligator. They just siphon all that junk down there. It all goes down and they get what they want to eat whatever else is near that thing's going down. Lay out for me, how this is the thing I hear about um people like talking about the death roll and then them and then them burying junk and scavenging junk, and if they catch a person, they'll stash a person under a log or something.

Or a deer walking through all that, like so here here he is, he's in his he's laying there, and a deer comes out to get a drink. Okay, laying there. He's seeing the deer at night at the water's edge. He's under the water. He or she's under the water, and approaches slowly under the water until he's near enough to attack the deer. Happens in a mill a second. If he can get ahold of the animal, he'll bring it back into the water and grab it by whatever he can grab and then walk back into the water

with it. And usually the prey dies by drowning. Okay, But then what happens is this is a thing that some colleagues he might have published recently about. It's called prey cashing. Okay. So they'll go like, find a wallow or a log, or it's coming, it's coming. Oh it's yeah, Oh yeah, it's coming. It's dead. But how do they get a leg off of a big deer? The death roll and a lot of times I'm going there, I'm

not leading your way. Yeah, so they'll take that animal and stick it under the water for a couple of days a week, and then they'll reapproach it and roll off. I don't think that there's data to suggest that a single animal will guard a prey cash. Well, how does how does it not? Just like if you stick a deer under the water, how does every gator in town not come and eat it? Yeah, I mean I think they do. I think a big alligator might have some

say and who comes and eats it? So like a large male crocodilian usually has a home territory and if a smaller male comes into that territory, they either get eaten or gotta got it. So if they put it in a spot that's there's I doubt there's much of

a struggles. Granted, if another alligator sees that deer being pulled into the water, it's going to make an attempt to try to eat something, So either at that time or after cashing has occurred, they'll bite onto what they think is a swallowable size part and roll it off to the death, roll underwater, roll it off, or that alligator trying to come steal a meal might latch onto something and roll and get a bite. So him him, that's his fork and knife, Yeah, his teeth, his roll. Yeah.

What about sense of smell? Like you met, you talked about they see this deer at the water's edge, But like dudes who go out and like are catching crocks or whatever, the commercial market meat or whatever, they're often like hanging a big chunk of chicken. Like, are they finding that I'm assuming by smell? Right? Yeah, you know, we don't know a lot about the chemosensory ability of crocodilians.

We know that it's probably pretty complex. Like we know that they probably use a lot of uh pheromones to communicate, but gosh, it's a challenge trying to isolate that stuff. I don't think anybody's really looked into that too much. But they don't have a mechanism by which you can They can't smell underwater cracked. Yeah, I mean I think so. I mean, when you hang that piece of chicken and it's rotting in the Louisiana sun and some of it

starts to drip off into the water, they know it's there. Okay, but yeah, well he does because he's taking he's taking water in. But when you're underwater, you're not gonna smell underwater. You're not you're not making anything in, you're not taking part of all that's like all that liquid is passing through their I don't know. That's why I'm that's why, that's why we have a guest on the show. Yeah, and this is I don't know if that's true. Like when you knew, when you know, I'm telling you this,

when you go underwater, Okay, like a beaver. Let's say you're trapping beaver and you put out beaver cast, right, he knows about it. When he's at the surface, he's gonna smell it on the air. When he's underwater, he's locked down, he's not he's not inhaling and picking up particles. A shark's underwater moving all that water through. And however they're doing it, they're tasting all the particulate matter in

the water. You're not, buddy, Yeah, but humans have a horrible sense of smell, So how can you make the comparison. I could put you underwater, Okay, I could put you underwater with some skunk smell, right, but I'm not. And can they smell underwater? I'll say this, when they're hunting, they use their site first, I'd imagine certain in certain scenarios. But the other thing we know about all crockatilians is that they have these really cool pits on their face

that sense change in water pressure. So when they can't see underwater, they can feel really well what's going on around them and snap it stuff. Oh really, So I think that those are the top two sort of modes of finding prey. But I know that there's a chemosensory ability there that is poorly understood or not understood well by me, which is likely possibility underwater, even underwater underwater body,

I figured duding triviat Now man is gator questions? I be all over that now I'm gonna go back to the beginning a little bit. Why you always hear the alligators were one so Endangered Species Act was seventy three, nineteen seventy three. Oh no, I got another question, Okay, before I get into this. Oh, this is the thing I was wondering about when I was in Florida. And this might not be your I'm sure it's not your ara of expertise, but maybe you've had some um run

ins on this one. I learned it when we say um the Seminal, Okay, that that was a sort of I always thought that the Seminal. I thought the Seminal were a like a sort of like always existing, like a like a pre contact, pre existing tribe of Native Americans that lived in Florida. I later learned that the Seminal was sort of like a later congregation of a later congregation of Native Americans and even others escaped slaves and things like formed this sort of like unit, the Seminal.

And then the Seminal wars was against these tribes, but they were that they were assembled out of other tribes. So had you asked me a month ago, I would have asked the question this way how did the seminal? Did they use these did they use alligator resources in their in their life ways for food and material products? But now I know that you wouldn't say that, you'd

say groups that I don't know their names. Is like, have you ever run into have you ever had any exposure to this question, like historically, like five hundred years ago, six hundred years ago, were humans using this resource? I've never been asked that question before, but I would venture to say yes, because I know that in like artifact site where they finally lot of stuff, they find a lot of alligator scoots got in some of those sites. Um, I mean, I'm sure they were used for food. Yeah.

When I was talking with this he's like, well, why in the hell not, I'm like, I don't. I mean, it seems obvious, but I don't know. Yeah, why not? Um? I mean I think that there's in South Florida in particular, there's a there's a lot of sort of heritage based, sort of cultural based, um, you know, efforts to alligator wrestling as a sport that I believe, if I'm not mistaken,

has pre European contact ties. Someone told me that, Ye, So that would venture to guess you know at that time then, yeah, they were probably utilized as a resource. I realized, I'm asking you something way outside of your wheelhouse. But it's okay, I appreciate the input. I'll comment on anything. Now here's my question. Okay, they're everywhere, dude, Like now, okay, I couldn't believe when we were turkey hunting right in our little Turkey area, there's like this. They were laying

on top of each other. You're going down this canal and it's dry right now, So I understand they're concentrated where you're going down to canal and you get to where you don't eat, Like at first, because we're from the north, they're like, oh my god, like you know, and the guy we're with that's from Florida, he don't, he can't even he don't even look like, oh my god, oh my god, are you seeing this? You know? Yeah, Richard just rolling his eyes. He's like, holy shit, man,

another one. They're all over, you know. I'm not saying there's too many of them, just saying there is a lot. But it blows my mind that, like in seventy three, they were they were kind of like one of the early endangerous species act things. How did they how did they get reduced that bad? You know what I mean when you look at like how abundant they are. Yeah, so that's a sort of classic story of unregulated harvest

for meat and hide. And they were just harvest I mean throughout the forties, nineteen fifties into the sixties, there was really no legislation that said you can't harvest as many as you can find, and you know, they nearly went extinct. It was it was that from like mechanically, it wasn't it wasn't from pollution now, woll No, that was not the major culprit at bad. It was like mechanically,

one by one removing killing them all. Yeah. I mean, of course pollution and habitat instruction have a hand in any decline in his species numbers. Yeah, but this was

directly tied to unrelated harvest. Yeah, but I mean there is like you get my distinction, right, like if you look at something, you know, the cormorant, when the cormaron was imperiled, the cormon was imperiled because of of like biotoxins, right, And certainly we lost certain or almost lost some avian predators from what was it was it DDT from from DUS. So it was like, you know, environmental factors drove them to your extinction. Compare that to sort of, um, you know,

the American buffalo. You'd be like buy and large. They were mechanically removed, I mean like one, two, three, like kill kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill to the point where you killed them all. And that's why I couldn't understand, like so with gators, like the gator hunters literally just like got them all. Yep, completely unregulated. That's the story, right, I mean there's a fair bit of commercial harvest of wild gators. Now, well that's what saved them, ironically, is

the regulation harvest actually saved them. And more than that, the utility of the American alligator as a natural resource became monetized in such a way that was reliant on successful wild populations. How do they how do they bake that up? So they were there were sort of two teams of people, one in southwest Louisiana and one in South Carolina that were sort of working towards the same

end goal at the same time. And I'm not sure if they collaborated or not, but essentially how it happened was that was that ranchers and harvesters, especially ranchers for eggs for hides, had to harvest eggs from wild populations near where they were located or otherwise, and they had to return a bunch. But if you're monetizing, if you're making money off of the existence of eggs being out there, there's got to be eggs out there the next year.

So really the amount of money that went into alligators as a natural resource saved the American alligator because now all these folks need there to be a bunch of alligators out there every year. Like if you based it on pounds of meat or number of hides like total in the US, what would be the percentage coming from wild gators versus like farm If you had to guess, I've seen these stats, I I would venture that most

of the hide industry comes from wild populations. But they're required to put back a ton of alligators every year that they're not allowed to harvest. They have size limits and things, well they have they have I think in most states they have proportioned limits. So whatever you collect in eggs, you got to put half of that back or a quarter of that back or third of that back. But I would imagine that the meat industry recreationally is all from wild harvest. But I'm not sure about you know,

large scale meat operations. I've never seen a farm that whose sole product is alligator meat, but I'm sure they exist because they traffic and hides. Two. Yeah, I mean hides. Hides is where the money is. That's the big money, and that's for boots sold. One did I did I miss it? How did they get the eggs back? And

how does that come into play? So I think most states have it where you harvest eggs, incubate eggs, hatch them out, and then a large number of what you hatch out has to go back to where you harvested those eggs. Why not just leave half the eggs because there's the probably a higher likelihood that it's gonna be a successful It's probably a higher likelihood there'll be a successful reproduction if you hatch them yourself. You look at when they're doing stuff, when you're doing stuff with salmon,

like you could take a salmon. You take a salmon out of the wild, take its eggs, and then you bring them um, you rear them. You know you're you're close to like one hundred percent of those eggs putting off a fingerling. Yeah, I mean I think in the while it'd be like maybe like zero or one percent would make it that far. Yeah, they do leave a lot of nests out there. I mean, it's impossible to

harvest all these nests. But there's some great data out of central Florida in the nineties that suggests that the number of eggs that are laid in a specific area, only about a third or less of those eggs reach one year old after hatching. So survivorship is super low anyway, So to leave them out there would be kind of a futile task. But it's a great story. How do they go coovery of the alligator? How talk about like like walk me through how an alligator? Like what is

its reproductive cycle? So yeah, American alligator typically lays its eggs June July, and you can tell. So if you live in Texas, egg laying anecdotally starts in Florida and spreads westward. So if you have egg laying in Florida, you can expect it to be upcoming. An all Obama, you can expect it to be upcoming in Louisiana and finally over there in East Texas. What time of year does she does she will she make love with a lot of males or are they somewhat monogamous? Yeah, No,

alligators have sperm storage and multiple paternity. We know that from a lot of work actually in Louisiana. So yeah, there'll be more than one So she'll breed with multiple males and then so those eggs could bear multiple fathers, it could be represented by multiple fathers. Yeah, some data from Cayman populations suggests that even though females are breeding with multiple males, there's really only one or two males

that sire pretty much all the eggs. But it's possible and so that that courtship occurs, you know in springtime, you know in South Florida, mark April, and then a little bit later as you move more north and more west, and then eggs are oviposited. You know. Nests are constructed essentially overnight and laid in mid June, late June, early July, laying out and they're laying out on the surface and like a little nest. The mounds. Yeah, so they'll build

mounds of like degraded vegetation. Well, they'll it won't be it won't be rotting vegetation at the time, but they'll harvest you know, spartana grass, whatever sort of vegetations available on the on the edge of the water, and they'll build a mound of it and then lay their eggs within that mound and then seal the mound up. So it's how many eggs, it's a pretty compact little little thing. How many eggs. The lowest I've ever seen is nineteen and the most eggs I've ever seen in nest is

fifty two. But I think you would say they would probably average thirty five eggs or so. Damn. So there's a lot of disparity in the number of eggs that a mother will overposit. Man, you can see it. It would be impactful. If you took those and protected them and incubated them, you get a lot of returns, a lot of gators back out there. So then continuing the timeline, what do we got we're in early July and by that nest if yes, so alligators typically wow, typically they're

they don't. But I would say about a third of alligators we'll hang out by that nest. Really early to start um and then they'll sort of ease off the nest during the middle of development and then return to the nest to assist with hatching. Well they do. Yeah, so they're they're really good moms in there and they come and they are they reliable to come back to

their own nests like another year. No, no no, no, I'm saying it wouldn't be like like she's going to return to the nest she laid right, She's not gonna just randomly just go to any old nest like she knows. They have fidelity to their own nest. They do, although there's some really cool data out of South Carolina that suggests that there's potentially some kind of altruism and nest defense, so like they found footage of multiple mothers defending the same nest and they were sort of unsure why at

that time. But normally the assumption is that, yeah, mom will hang out by her nest in a wallow and defend it or not from a predator. And there's a degree to which they defend, Like if you pull up in a boat, some moms will just run away and hang out one hundred yards away and say what are you doing in my nest. Other moms will attempt to roll the boat over, so you get it from time to time, but alligators are probably the most frequently. They will attend and defend the nest as frequently as any

other species of crocodilia. Got it, so she'll hang out lay it, and then how long is incubator or how long do they lay there? That's incubation, rightation alligators on average about sixty five days. And is it true that the temperature determines the sex of hackling? Yes, it is true, so that nest will throw all males or all females

depending It could depending on the temperature. But usually there's a well, usually there's a thermal regime within the nest cavity that allows for potentially both sexes to be produced. But it could be manipulated where thirty eggs are all male. Yeah, if you put it in a lab and put it at like whatever, you set the temperature for, like seventy eight degrees yeah, or whatever the hell it is may be. Yea like eighty one and a half to eighty three

fair knights is the temperature regime for one sex. Yeah, so it's they exhibit FMF sex termination it's called type two sex termination. So at low incubation temperatures you get females, and that the sort of narrow range you get males, and when you get above that second pivotal temp you get females again. But there's some argument that that upper pivotal temper has never reached more more coming on that next time. I'm here, what happens working on that right now?

Somebody's not me. What happens if that nest gets rated by a raccoon or whatever, all the eggs get destroyed. Does she just start over or she can't start over? She may wait till next year. There are a few species of crocodilian that have multiple clutches in the year, but those that's very rare. Okay, what's the primary raccoons? By far, raccoons and hogs that old bandit hogs like aigator eggs. I just have a question for You're saying within one nest, based on the temperature regime, you can

have males and females. Is there any data on like how eggs are dispersed within the nest in terms of like an area under more vegetation, which would be colder or warmer or like if there's any kind of yeah, yeah, So those questions we thought would be really interesting to

ask in whole nesting animals like the American crocodile. What we find an American alligator nest is that they're essentially within a compost pile of rotting vegetation, and the temperature seems to stay relatively hot and relatively stable in there. I mean, yeah, there are nests that that bridge that the lower pivotal temp which means males and females will thermally be produced. But we had the same idea as

you in Costa Rica. So the American crocodiles dig holes in the sand and deposit their eggs in there, like similar to a turtle exactly like a turtle, yeah, just a lot more eggs and a lot bag. So they'll pull up on a sand bar and dig with their back feet and no deposit and then covered up back up. But we thought, yeah, if it's if it's under some shade, under a tree, then that may play a role in

the thermal regime of that nest. If it's really deep in the sand exactly, then that will also probably play a role. But we actually found that neither of those things matter at all. They're completely uncorrelated to the thermal regimes of these nests. But what happens to be correlated is the egg size. So metabolic heating is playing more of a role in determining the thermal regime of these nests than how much shade or how deep the nest is. That's a sample size of you know, fourteen or fifteen

or so nests, which was hard enough to get. Meaning the same way that the human body generates heat metaball heating, yep, metabolism. Heat is given off x organic reactions. So the larger warmth is generating warmth in the nest. Yeah, So we put in these little I couldn't be that you put

your hand on and it felt warm. It's just like slight, right U two point five degrees c. So we put an eye button in the center of the nest cavity, and then we put an eye button at the exact same depth of that eye button a meter away from the nest. And we found that the average difference in temperatures between those two little eye button loggers was two and a half degree celsius, which is a lot hm. Right,

what is now, kid? There somebody google that it's got to be like five or six degrees fahrenheit or more so when those little baby alligators are ready to how many days gestation or not gestation? Alligators incubation about sixty five on average. So she lays them, Yeah, and she might scraaddle, she could, she might yep, but then she might come back around hatch time. Well, she usually stays there for a week or two after ovipositing, defends the nest,

is hanging around. You see them at the nest. And then we find that the frequency of attendance goes down towards the middle of incubation, likely because mom's got other things to do. She has probably hasn't eaten in a couple of weeks, she needs to seek some other thermal refugia besides sitting on the bank of a swamp, you know, and then returns a week or two before hatching and hangs out with them. And does she need to dig

them out or they dig themselves out like turtles. Yeah, I mean, there's there's a lot of interesting stories that alligator moms will open the nest for them and remove them and sort of carry them over to where they need to be in the water or whatever. But most of the nest that I approach that have hatched, that doesn't happen. The eggs just hatch, and the hatch things just sort of move around and wriggle themselves to the top. How long are they when they come out? Six inches seven?

But they do make a lot of sounds. So alligator hatchlings in the egg when they're ready to hatch will kind of make this little chirp noise like dude, ye or you hear the eggs doing that. Yeah, And that signals hatching to occur theoretically in the other eggs around that eggs, and it also theoretically we have but it also helps mom know that it's time to come over. Really yeah, I mean that's the That was the nice story.

I was talking to a guy that hunt they're hunting gators down in Florida, and they use that sound like if they're looking for a big gator, don't make that sound and get that thing to like show itself. I do it all the time. Yeah, Yeah, it works, It works pretty well. Ye be honest, is next calling U and they're there? Yeah, do a gator way way of baby gator. You said two and a half degrees celsius. Yeah, Chris, that's four and a half degree fair knight really feel

it though? Yeah it's hotter. Wait what like the difference? So like, so if something is two and ashcree celsius more than it would be fourie fare kneit um. When she comes back to hang out of them, what is she actually doing? I mean, do the little baby gators come out, let's say twenty of them come crawling out of the mud. Yeah, they don't imprint on her like I mean, does she is she able to sort of manipulate the group and orchestrate and be like I'll show

y'all how to catch shrimp? Like do you know what I mean? Like, what is she really doing? Or she just keeping predators away from the general vicinity? Yeah? I think most of her role at that time is trying to not let herrings and raccoons and large stuff eat them. Okay, she's a presence, she's exactly she's there to say, don't

come eat my hatchlings kind of thing. But there's I mean, there are some some crocodilians that are, you know, really incredible from a parental aspect, like the male garial in India will essentially let all the hatchlings ride on its back for quite a long time after after hatching there there, I would say that of all the vertebrates that I've ever learned about, my favorite parents are crocodilians. I'm also biased, but take that for what. Is there a fair bit

of cannibalism that goes on. Oh yeah, at larger sizes. I mean I remember going out collecting samples in Louisiana and seeing an eight foot alligator with a four foot alligator hanging out of its mouth, But not so much the little babies. Yeah. I mean, if you're a male alligator and you hear that sound, you're gonna come eat

those babies. Oh that's why they're liking that sound. Yeah, I mean, that's why it's easy to use to get an alligator to show itself, because I mean, I wants to eat it, or a female that's outside of the reproductive time probably will want a snack. Then there's no paternal The males have no as far as we know, no comprehension of what females and what nest they sired. I mean, they're just they're out of the picture in alligators. Yeah, that. Yeah,

that's my understanding. There's no paternal investment really in the clutch, and they'll they'll mild those little babies down, they'll eat them up. Yeah, huh yeah, And that's probably I mean, I would say that's true for most crocodilian species, where the paternal aspect is effectively irrelevant after fertilization. When they're real little like that, six inches long. Yeah, what are they trying to feed down? Bugs and stuff? Little bugs? I mean for a long time, they probably don't even eat.

You know, they come out with a yolk sac that's hanging behind him, that's not fully shut yet, So in the a they've got this yolk sac on their belly, and when they hatch out, there's essentially a I mean you can see it still there. And then eventually the yolk will get absorbed in the skin will heal around it.

So they're sustaining on that for a good while, I don't really think, I don't know how long, but a little while before they start getting there swimming legs under them and can go eat bugs and little fish and stuff like that. But they hang by the nest for a couple of weeks. You know, they'll hang arout by it, They'll hang around. Yeah, what are you guys, you or your colleagues, what are your theories on in South Florida? What are your theories on what's happening with the dynamic

between the pythons and gators? Like you hear these crazy cases where like a python grabs the gator and it swallows it in the gator fights his way back out of its gut. Yeah, I mean, what is there anything substantial going on here between? Is it like a new great food source? Is it negligible impact? Yeah? I mean I think there's a lot better people to ask than me who work on crocodilians and Florida about that particular topic.

But for me, not knowing much you know, in that area, I would say that it's kind of a negligible thing. I mean, yeah, you get these interesting stories of large pythons that have killed in our eating a smaller alligator, and you see potentially alligators with a snake in their mouth. But I think you just sort of introduced one and more organism to the assemblage there that that gets eaten or is eating, you know, is eating or eats can

chomp on each other. But I don't. I don't see that as a necessarily a prevalent, mainstay, viable resource for either one of those species. Speaking of pythons, we had a guy he didn't work on this project, but his colleagues did. Is they were trying to figure out how far pythons can spread. Yeah, and I feel like it involved making these little enclosure like barying pythons or something in the for the winter and in the spring see that they were dead or alive. Anyways, they drew a

sort of hypothetical line, I mean how far north thing? Sorry, Yeah, they're trying to be like, okay, in the future house, like at what point will what would be the climate restriction? Sure, and they drew a rough line maybe went through something like I can't remember if it reached South Caroline or not, or feasibly they could like reliably survive the winter. Yeah, what prevents gate? Like why why can't we have alligators

in the Great Lakes? It's too cold? That's it. Yeah, I mean that's obvious, but that that that is what it is, because it would do the cold would do what the cold would metabolically shut them down to a state in which the when the temperatures were adequate in the summer, they would have they wouldn't be able to harvest enough resources to survive the extended period that's below their critical thermal mini So there's a realizing niche and

a fundamental niche. Realizing niches. What aspects of your environment do you commonly see or are exposed to? A fundamental niches, what aspects of this undimensional hyper volume of environment will kill you or not? And the thermal regime of somewhere that far north is outside of the fundamental niche of an American alligator. So it's a length of exposure thing. Yea. You see them with their nose up in North Carolina. Yeah,

and the ice and that kind of stuff. Yeah, but they can't sustain that for I mean six months of the year. It feels like up here, you know, it'd be cool though. I wish they were in the Great Lakes. Yeah. If you what's crazy? If you think, um, you imagine a grizz on the north slope, you know, grizzly in a lot of places they're black bears, and a lot of parts of their range they're spending more months underground. They are up, yeah, up and about they're spending more

months not not foraging. Yeah, spending more months not foraging than foraging. Yeah, but that would become bad news for a gator. Yeah, I mean, aside from just the temperature being so called that it kills them. Oh, gotcha know? And then uh, well how long can they make it between meals? Yeah, I mean yeah, I think that that crocodilians can survive in theory months without a meal. From a sort of low metabolic standpoint, right, we talked about

the animals estivating um in Costa Rica. That's two three months without literally no chance to eat, right, Um, So metabolically, since they're sort of low profile on that, they can go a long long time without eating. But when they do, they utilize it relatively efficiently. From a cellular perspective, I had a guy that guides on Okachobe, Captain Bob Stafford guides gator hunts on Okechobee, and he says, when he's

gotten a client, okay, who wants a trophy gator. He says, a trophy gator is ten feet that in his mind is like trophy gator land. Okay, So when he has like a client that really wants a big gator. They're looking for a ten plus gator. How old is that? Yeah, that's a hard question because growth rates are directly correlated to the thermal environment and resource acquisition for that animal. So I'll give you an example. I know of a seventy five year old wild alligator in Okifinoki Swamp. He's

alive right now. Well was in two thousand and seven. It was seventy five at the time, and that animals about twelve feet long. Seventy five years old, and he's twelve feet long, so I don't maybe a little bigger, but I don't know that you can draw, you know, a clear straight line between age and length. But I would imagine you could have one this twelve feet and sixty years old, right, or you could have one this fourteen feet and seventy five years old, right, A male, yeah,

at that size. But I'll tell you. In Costa Rica, you know, we would mark hatchlings in hopes of finding them again and the next year, so we mark a hatchling that's also about you know, six or seven inches long. We found one the next year, twenty two kilometers away from where we marked it that was over a meter long. So what the heck is going on there? That thing

grew incredibly fast. He went from six inches to roughly mid thirty three and a half feet yeah, to three and a half year really yeah, which I was blown away by. We found that someone more like someone moved your tag. Well, it's impossible someone's a scoot that's removed from the back. So they all get an individual ID number.

But that makes me say, you know, I've always thought that, you know, in general of crocodilian will grow up like a foot a year if you're an alligator, which makes a nine foot long animal, you know, not nine years older or a little older. But that really changed my perspective on stuff like when you see a three meter animal in Costa Rica, do we really think that that's only three or four years old? Potentially? Like there needs to be a lot more investigation done on on that.

What's the oldest you've heard about for them? For the American alliger, seventy five from Okay Finochi. But that so that as far as to end in the wild, that's the that's the top end that I've heard of. I wouldn't be surprised if they live eighty years, you know, for for a statistical outlier, but I would say forty five to sixty years. If you make it past that an initial small stage, you got a good shot. Older

for crocs, sir h. Hard to say. Hard to say, especially if we're talking about that potentially super fast young rate of growth in Costa Rica. How how old are those monsters out there? Are they only fifteen or twenty? I mean, I don't, I don't know. I don't. I don't think we know. I bet Australia has a really good data on that for saltwater crocodiles because they and when they get to the end of their lifespan, just like us, they just they age out. They go. Yeah. Week,

I found a dead croc sitting on the bank. I was actually on a on a tour in Costa Rica, helping with a tour and there was a crocodile on the bank and I said, let's go over and see that thing. And we approached it and it was just dead. No idea why, just got old and died there. He said, Boys on that bank and die a peaceful place. Yeah, I mean, never seen anything like that before. Yeah, And this thing was probably three and a half meters long, So like twelve thirteen. So what is what is? What

do you call an adult alligator? How do you define an adult alligator? Like I was saying an adult wild turkey? Yeah, let's call it tom it's two full Yeah, yeah, we use that term. But at what age is he at? What age would you say like, that's a mature adult? Yeah? So when when they I would use the word adult when they're obviously of reproductive status. And give me a rough ballpart for a male seven eight feet for a female six six feet plus? Okay, once he gets to

that size, is what's gonna kill him? Is that to be a human or another alligator? Okay, bigger alligator but yeah, humans or ecotoxins or another bigger bull alligator. What's the uh male female like max size difference? Yeah, males get get larger than female and that's like across the board with crocodilians or yeah pretty yeah, um, but I mean sexual dimorphism, good phrase, nice job. Yeah. I mean an adult male can you know pretty easily reach ten twelve

fourteen feet? Um? I think the biggest female I've ever called caught was, you know, nine and a half feet and that's a that's a big female, got it. So when people are like one in the case, these guys hunting trophy gators are hunting. Those are males. Yeah, they're

hunting big bull males, usually open water. Is there any visual like if you were looking at justica pile of crocodiles, could you, let's say they're all roughly the same size, could you pick out the males and the females anyway to do like a physical attribute, you know that becomes pronounced at a certain year. I had a student that was interested in that question and utilized a tool called geometric morphometrics, which is a shape quantifics a lot of morphs. Yeah,

geometric morphometrics. It's a shape quantification tool where he took photos of heads of males and photos of heads of females and sort of allowed the software to see if there were any subtle differences. And there are. I don't remember what they were because we haven't published those data yet. But I think that I have a little instinct to say that's a male and that's a female, but to be able to describe, like they can't explain what they're doing when they do it. Yeah, And I think a

lot of valigator Bible just might have that. You know, when you look at that and say that's a male, but there's no clear thing for the average person be like, that's a no, And I don't even think it's clear to us. Like when I'm doing it, I say, seventy percent in my mind, that's a male. Yeah, but am

I am? I right? That's like that blackbear hunters. Well, there a range of black bears where it's like they're of a size that you're like, I don't know, could be you know, but now and then, well, Yanni was telling me the other day, when you see a mountain lion with the big forehead wrinkles, explain that the once that look real angry. Yeah, they got the fat rolls on their forehead. It's actually a vertical crease. It's a vertical crease. Okay, I've ever talking about that. It looks

like darker than the rest of the day. When you see that vertical crease, you're looking at a big male or or so they say, Yeah, do you you ever eat alligators? Or you or you don't? Are they not advertising to you? Oh they're great? Yeah? How many how many times a year to eat alligator? Well? Maybe three? I make an alligator sauce pecant of the old old Louisiana recipe that is just dynamite. Okay. It's a tomato based, rue based sort of soupy stew. And it's hot, it's spicy,

and uh put my alligator meat in there. Oh man, So I know you're fisherman. Do you have you ever hunted gators or just get meats somewhere else? I just buy it from the sustainably harvested meat that's sold. You never put in for gator permits or nothing. No. Let's say I handed you a gate or tag right now, would you be like sweet? Would you be like no, I'm not gonna go out in the wild and harvest an alligator myself. I catch them all the time for for the stuff that I do for my job, But

just not. You don't. You don't have that. You don't have that. It's just not when you guys are catching them to do whatever research on an individual animal you want to do, how are you getting them? Are you putting hook baited hooks out or no, that'll hurt the thing. As a physiological ecologist, I need that thing to last a lot longer than after it deals with me, right, so we can catch them by hand. If they're small, we can catch them by a snare on a on

a pole. So it literally takes like like a snare that makes like a lasso with a tree lock mechanism on it, and I electrical tape it to a cane pole and I'm on in a boat on the front of the boat, and I try to put that that open open part of the snare over its neck and yanket shut. And then as soon as I get it on the boat, I opened the snare get it off

of them. So you're not setting snares for him, No, And when I was just the floor, we were talking about you know there's a conna bears, there's a body gripping trap, okay, one ten, two, twenty three thirty and

then they've started to fill it in like one sixty. Anyways, mean seth or Tom about get some a eighties because we found some pinch points for gators that have been dynamite man, well yeah, eighty connor bear setting at little where these channels would neck down due would you'd be getting like, do you guys ever capture like real big ones? And how would do so? How are you doing that? Same way. Yeah, we'd use a snare, so you guys don't set like some kind of trap that that thing would.

I've set traps for alligators before, but that's because I need specific individuals, like the mom that laid that nest, So I set the trap at a nest site. We're

kind of I want only those that individual gator. It's essentially a two by four eight foot by three foot box that I wrap in chain link and has like a a piece of fence in the front where they go in the back and get a bait, not off of home, but just off off a thing and it pulls a pin in the door and then I get him the next morning and work them up and get them out. That's gotta be a hefty contraption. I've built probably four of them. Most of them burn up in

marsh fires, to be honest. But I during a matter during my matters, I had really good successful Like how long is It's about eight feet long and you set it on the ground, setting on the ground so he's coming out of the water to come right well, like the front lip of it is at the water's end, and what are you baiting with? Chicken? Really like that yeah, people do that. I've had up on them. Yes, Oh my god, they oh my god. Yeah, they're tearing everything apart.

They don't. But then you have to somehow get in the trap with it to work it out, and that's always problematic. What's the biggest gator you can rassle? I asked this to a guy the other day. This guy's name begins with alligator. Let's do many people down there? I realized, Yeah, I said, what's the biggest gator you can rassle? He said, you could rasp the ten foot gator. I'm like, how could that be true? The biggest alligator

I've ever caught was ten ten fix. So really, yeah, by yourself, you're saying, but it was some else more than you do though. Yeah, I mean, it's all just rules. I mean, I know a guy who wrestles alligators better than anybody, and he's one hundred and forty pounds soaking wet. Okay, want me through it. Here he is, there's a gator ten fo there's a gator in the water. Let's say he's in the water and I'm on a boat with

a headlamp and I see that in the water. How deeps the water six feet really eight feet though they had to be on a bank. But no, But now it depends visibility in the water. Is there visibility gin clear? Oh, well then it's cake. I win every time, like a chocolate shake. Then a gator wins almost every time on the top, and get the snare on like pretty good visibility, Yeah, so clear, but pretty chocolate six feet of water, ten

foot gator. So usually we'll like approach it pretty slow, shut the motor off in a mud boat or something like that, and try to get close enough with angling the beam of the head lamp just off of the head so that the eye is still in sort of that peripheral light that's emitted, but it doesn't think that you're looking directly at it. Ye, these are secrets that I really shouldn't be sharing. Trade secrets. Trade secret I mean. And then uh, try to get near enough to put

that snare around around its head and come about rastling it. Well, that's the first step. Then you bring it over to the boat because you can rassle them without a snare. You just mean in the water the circus and see a guy rastling a gator. Yeah, I mean, there are tons of people who do that really well in captive environments in South Florida. I mean there's there's folks. No, okay,

so okay, I want to hear what you do. But I thought that like I thought it was a thing where like you grab the gator by the tail, he goes left, you manipulate his tail. Oh and yeah, I mean you can do that stuff if you're in an enclosure. I don't do that. I work in wild populations. You can't just walk up to an alligator and reliably catch it. I mean, I'm sure it's happened. Got people that are

really good at this, but better than me. But but that's not like if you're gonna go get one tonight, that's not your plan, No, because usually I need to get one hundred in a month or something like that. So wasting that time plus the yeah, plus it's unsafe and would be um, you would be viewed poorly by my employer. We had we're friends with this guy who's a Turkey biologist. Yeah, I Heed was telling us a

story about an unkillable gobbler. Is there like like old gators that are like uncatchable, like they hear the boat and they're just unkillable gobbler because someone killed the unkillable gobbler in a tree. Nope, but the new unkillable gobler telling me, hone uh. He said that, Um, they think they got a gobbler that as you're calling him in, he gets to a certain distance and then flies up

into the tree. That's the one I'm talking about. Look around, that's the one I'm talking and then like hops from tree to tree. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we talked about that. Yeah, I must have told you about after I've seen him, because I can imagine there's got to be some old ass gators that are just ghosts. Like he's not gonna get me. That's what that that guy in Oakachobi. I said, other gators out here that can live their whole life

and not get killed. And he said they get smart, man, Yeah, he goes, they get like hunting a weary white tail. You get to be fifty years old. And he said they know like they don't they don't make big mistakes. They like they they they'll like hold up and thick shit. You don't just catch them out dicking around like they get cautious. Because he's looking for they're looking for gators

in like certain situations. Are they cracking them with rifles or how they get no know He takes Cornish game hens fills them with fill a foam so they crack sealer. You can't use a hook, so they use a wooden dowell sharpened on each end and you bury that in the Cornish game hen. And what they do is they find the gate or they want watch it. And he gets to spot where he feels like he can approach it and it's in its instinct isn't going to be to run away, but he can approach it where it's

instinct's gonna be good. Go down, lay on the bottom. So they'll watch with buyos. They hunt the daytime and he'll get to be like, okay, we can approach it now and its response will be to hide and not book. They go to it and they know right where it is, and he says he sets that bait right where he knows that when he comes up he's gonna find the bait, opens the bail on his fishing rod and goes and

gets a couple hundred yards away and waits. He says, eventually it's gonna come up if you did your job right, and he goes you gotta put an up current or up wind. When he comes up, he's gonna be like, oh, shoot a corners game, hen and go eat it. And he said, you'll watch and you'll know when he ate it. Good is his tail and his head come up because he's trying to choke it down. He goes because says, sometimes they'll carry it. Yeah, and if you pull, he's

just gonna drop it. But you why wait until and if you get if you're too close him, he's never gonna eat it, he said. If he if he knows you're there, he's gonna grab it and leave. If he thinks he's cool, you wash and you'll know that he's swallowed it, at which point he closes the bail and tightens up on it and first takes up all the braid and gets it to like a cable leader, and then they just start fucking rastling it on the end of that cable leader. Eventually they use a um. Eventually

he's a bankster. Yeah. Yeah, they'll get another hook into it. Yeah you can't. You can use a hook, but you can't bait it. So then they'll get a snag like a big treble. Then they'll get a snag and hooking it and then they and then they get it up. Said, everybody's got a job. Everybody on the boat like does this. Yeah that you do this and eventually a banks ticket. Okay, so you go, you you you, you approach your gator. Yeah,

with a snare, with a snare. But aren't there a lot of them just aren't going to never let you

approach it? Yeah? Yeah, I mean back to your point, I mean, there was there are some folks in Costa Rica who talk about seven meters sized animals in the Tempisk River and um, I mean those are gigantic animals and the reason they get that big is because nobody can ever get a hold of them, right, So I there are animals out there that are sort of iconically large that you see, you know, once a decade, But that, I mean, that's obviously really hard live, uncatchable, undetected. Yeah.

Me and my buddy were standing on the bank of a boat dock in Costa Rica once and we saw a head off in the distance in the river that looked to be like five feet long. Just the head, the head, just the head. I mean, obviously me I want I want that to be this massive thing but man, never seen a head that big. I never saw it again. You didn't go rastle it, couldn't rastle it percent of the time for the head thing. I don't know if

this applies to crocodise, but isn't it for alligators? You can estimate their length by the width of they're like they're length of their head or something like that. Yeah, there's that. There's a sort of crude anecdotal metric of the distance from the naars to the eyes in inches is roughly how long the animal is in feet. But I mean I think that's relatively reliable. Yeah, So you approach them in the boat. Approach them in the boat. You're come in behind them any which way they'll let

me approach. I mean most of the time they'll just run or go under, swim away, and they'll reappear, you know, thirty yards to your left. Oka you do the whole whole thing again, start the boat up, move over to them. If you can get within twelve feet or so, is is the cane pole length, then great, he's something. Oftentimes I try to put the snare on and miss and do it again. But what if he just goes into some real thick shit, you can't go in. Or after all,

if they go on land, then they're mine. They go up in the vegetation, I can work my way up in there and put the snare on them. But it's when they go down then I have no idea. When they're coming up, I mean, I'll I'll chase an out. Well, I've learned now to just not like in open waters in Mobile Bay where we're doing research, I could. You could be after the same alligator for eight hours and never catch it. So after like three tries, I move

on to green your pastures, like you're not gonna get them? Yeah, I give up on them. And when you put the snare, run it where you trying to put it around his neck? Do you place it with that pole? Place it with a pole? And then them you ain't get shut bring them in or if they're too big to be in the boat, move the boat onto shore and move the animal up on the shore. And what's his attitude about this whole thing? He's pissed. They're not happy. I wouldn't

be happy. And you get them up on shore and then how do you how do you eventually get control of them? Cover their eyes? Usually with something if they're really angry, and then one person holds the rope, the other person hops on, shuts their mouth. Use gator tape aka electrical tape. Tape their mouth shut. Not even electrical tapes. Fine, a couple of raps, mouth shut. Tavi's mouth shut. Get the snare off as soon as you can process the animal.

So as powerful as that jaw is, yeah, but when it's closed, to get it open, a little bit of resistance is going to keep them from doing that. Yeah. Yeah. There are big animals in cost Rica that we've called I think the biggest crocodilian we've ever caught was a little over sixteen feet. Those are difficult animals to move. Takes a whole team of six or eight of us to move them, well, sometimes less. But the hard part is getting the mouth shut enough to actually put electrical

tape on it. Because the top of the jaw to the bottom of the jaw of animal that size is like a foot tall. So I am using all my strength in my arms just to get the mouth shut. You know, somebody runs over and tapes the mouth real quick. Have you ever gotten nipped or got your hand in there on accident or has seen that happen. Man, go ahead and knock on wood right now. No battle scars whatsoever.

I have never been seriously injured by a crocodilian. Goodness again, have you ever seen anyone get nipped or got their hands stuck in there? Yeah? Yeah, that's just like a good way to get an infection. Yeah sure, I imagine you got to watch out for that tail too. Huh. People say that, really, but it's not a yeah, I mean, it hurts if it hits you. I mean on a really big animal, you can knock you off your feet, but it's not gonna snap your leg and a half. No.

People say that, but that's just hype. So ask you. He can't hurt you with any other body part other than that jaw, really, like you can't. I mean, the whole process is painful for me, especially like in Costa Rica. So usually I jump first on the head and then there's two hundred and fifty pound former football player jumps on behind me and mashes me down onto the animal. That hurts more than anything, as that hurts a lot, but at my age, I try to do that as

little as possible. Now and it's his instinct when you're messing with them. It's instinct is to bite you. Well, it's instinct just to get out of the situation that I rudely put it in. Yeah, you know, in this whole scenario. But I mean he'll he'll deliterally snap at you or no, yeah, okay if you can Yeah, got it. So that's on its mind to defend itself by snap and not just to get away. Yeah, and any means

necessary to get off of it. I mean, when you have a rope around your neck, you can't get away. Your last resort is to just not get killed, and that's what probably it thinks it's going to happen. Yeah. Can we get into their immune system a bit, because you're telling me how interesting, how robust the immune system is. I know we don't have too much time yet left, but immune this is some really interesting work done. Adam McNeice, colleague of mine. Um. Can I say his name? Oh yeah,

Mark Merchant. He's a phenomenal biochemist who studies alligators and his work has shown that. So he essentially wanted to say how strong is alligator blood at killing stuff? And he threw like every kind of fungal pathogen at it a ton of viruses, any bacteria, like twenty three bacteria and it killed them all. Their innate immune system is just so robust at killing pathogens. It's blood. You're saying that it put bacteria and viruses in alligator blood. Yeah.

They take blood from the alligator and have like super controlled assays in which they do this stuff. You put blood in a little plate toobe in the plate, and then put other stuff, bad stuff in there, and you can measure how much of the bad stuff was killed. They also do this like zone of inhibition style metric where they they grow a bacteria on a plate and then they put a drop of alligator blood plasma in the center and then measure the diameter of bacteria that

is no longer on that plate because it was killed. Wow. And they are so so fast good and killing stuff, and people are probably interested in this whole exactly. Yeah. You know, I'll say this now because it's a good segue. Alligators are great model organisms for human health from an immune perspective, from an eco toxicological perspective, from an endocrine perspective. I mean they they should be more highly regarded in that capacity, and they're starting to be what um, But

but they're they're not sensitive to ecotoxics. Oh they are. They are because I know, like like frogs are horrifically sensitive, right, I mean yeah, I would say, So there's this There are these things called endocrine disrupting contaminants or endocrine disrupting compounds. And one of the biggest case studies used alligators in Florida out of the Lugillette lab and continued Lugillette lab lineage.

They looked at how how synthetically produced contaminants in a lake actually bias the sexual differentiation of hatchling alligators and subsequent age classes. So like, if you expose an alligator to a compound that mimics estrogen or antagonizes estrogen or antagonizes androgens, like all like birth control stuff in the water supply and everything. Yeah, but those receptors are pretty good. Well, the things we make are really good at binding to

those receptors or antagonizing them. And the first real case study on environmental estrogens was done in Lake Apopka in central Florida. And I mean you talk about paragrine falcons and cormorants and all that type of stuff, I would say you know, the biggest case study that sort of taught the world about the power of endocrine disrupting cataminants was on alligators. Really, and that study system is still producing tons of really interesting information. Tons like that stuff

is damaging. Oh yeah, So in that scenario, most of the toxins, if memory serves, were environmentally estrogenic, probably anti androgenic. So when when you're exposing mom to these compounds through people, mostly like organic chlorine pesticide use usually I'm sorry, I thought you were saying that that. You know, there's you hear about hormones and drinking water from various from various human treatments, hormones. Get I thought you meant that that's

what's happened. No, no no, no, yeah, so those are the same thing, because these biotoxins are these biotoxins are influencing the hormones in gators. Not that we're putting hormones in the water that's affecting gators, right, They're they're mimicking endogenous hormones, hormones that naturally exist within the body or at least

binding to their receptors. And that because these things are have temperature dependent sex determination, all that really means is the temperature creates up a genetic cascade that turns on one enzyme or turns on a different enzyme, and that's where those enzymes take a maternally supplied hormone pool and say this is all going to become estrogen or this

is all going to become androgen like like testosterone. And when you bias that maternally supplied steroid pool was something that looks like estrogen or looks like an androgen, all of a sudden, the signals become a little washy, and you're able to produce in that case, feminized male alligators or super female alligators, in which you see things like like polynuclear oocytes more than one nuclei per egg, or polyovular follicles more than one egg per follicle in females,

which is an abnormality, and then you see feminized male individuals that maybe have If you take the gonad out and histologically examine it, slics it really really thin and look at under a microscope, you'll see seminiferous tubules, which are the portions of the gonad that makes berm and then right next to those you may see one egg and You're like, what the heck is going on here? Must be an intercondisrupting contaminant. Better apply for a grant. Man,

It's what degree is that going on? I mean, I guess that's the question. Ultimately, people are gonna want to know us to what degree is that going on with humans? Yeah? I mean I teach an eco toxicology class at the master's level of Southeastern and a lot of the literature that we read tends to focus on how potentially volatile these things are. So in the air, So polar bears in the North Pole have super high amounts of PCBs, a synthetic thing that they would never have otherwise been

exposed to aside from than being in the air. So I mean, if we're talking about humans, yeah, we're exposed to a lot of stuff all the time. Um, red meat in farm mistake has dioxins in it to a higher degree than almost anything else that you eat. I'm really throwing throwing stuff under the bus here. But I

mean maybe we should drink alligator blood and be perfect. Yeah, well that doesn't yeah, but I mean, yeah, I think that the use of alligators to teach us about how these ecotoxins may or may not be affecting humans is a super viable pathway for research and is and continues to be. Man, you got me thinking about that gator blood. What's the uh what was it that? Remember one early

in the pandemic um python oil? No, what President trol mused about has anyone looked into that you would drink well each No, no, it caused a big shit storm in the news that I can't know. It wasn't no, no, no, what No. There was like a there was a press conference and someone mentioned that there was some impact of something and there was like a wondering if if, like somehow there was a way to sort of metabolize the substance.

Either way, it's got me wondering about you know, you could see a sci fi movie right where people were wanting to consume gait or blood. Well, there's a lot of I mean there has there harveston hide and meat. They could start like a whole supplement thing with the blood. You know. One of the worst movies ever made, um one of my favorite actors worst movies was called The Hunter. Not yeah, not dar Suzala one of the greatest movies

ever made. Last Uh, He's hunting for the biomedical. The biomedical evil people wanted their hands on the last thera. What's the what's a Tasmanian tiger? Is a therascene? They got some name. It's a Lazarus species where people are eyes like that it saw one, but maybe it didn't actually go extinct. The evil Like, if there's a movie and there's biomedical people in it, those people will be bad. Oh for sure, I can promise you. Generally the hunters are bad too. And the oil, big oil Disney movies.

When they got to set up a conflict, it's the oil people. But BioMed, you're gonna be bad. Never be cast in a movie if you're a BioMed person. They want the lasts. It's not a Tasmanian devil. It's something bigger than Tasmanian tiger. Yeah, there's a tiger or Tasmanian wolf. Maybe William Dafoe. They catch word that there's one left in Willem dafolds like a hunter slash mercenary. And he's and he gets and he takes off with some He

has a magical backpack. He heads into the Tasmanian outback with a little backpack, but keeps producing amazing things from this little backpack. There's like an also like side love story going of course. Yeah, um, it's a good movie. He's got a little pack, but also he's got like a shitload of giant traps and gun he needs to go kill this stra scene for the Evil BioMed people, This evil Tasmanian tiger, which is a mark. It's the

cool animals. A marsupial like a like a marsupial predator and uh, in the end, he gets kind of burned out on the Evil Biomedical people, shoots it anyway, which really surprised me. Shoots it anyway and then burns it up. He's like in the end, it's kind of like, well, by god, no one's gonna have it, right, It's a weird way to handle it, but yeah, shoots the last one and burns it up, being like they're not gonna

have it. No one's gonna have it. Damn it. What was that time on this first Yet that thing's blood to cure sicknesses, to make sicknesses. They're gonna do something with it. So now you know a picturing like does the alligator blood having some kind of that's I mean that ultimately has to be the The idea that like that would be where the big time funding comes from is that if they have this ability to fight off all these infections, then um, that would be a biomedical interest.

And I imagine if they have this demonstrable if if synthetic substances in the environment in the form of pollution, have this demonstrable effect on their hormone development and reproduction, that probably becomes of great interest to medical researchers. Absolutely, yeah, I would. I would as a disclaimer, say, do not go try to get alligator blood for any purpose ever.

Thank you. What's the but? But yeah, I think you're absolutely right, and I think there's a lot of work that are that's beginning to use alligators as model organisms for human health. What's that's a great thing. What's the state of the gator in the US? How are they They're doing great? I'll handle that one. Yeah, okay, sit, ye. So there's no places where there's like, man, things aren't going well here, they're like generally doing very well. Yeah.

I mean throughout the range. Since they're since there need to be a sustainable resource, they're quite readily managed. In the states that they're abundant you know, Louisiana, Florida, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina has a great program. There are people that manage these things just like any other harvestable resource. And when you see a gator hunter, you're not like you

hell billy rednecks. You're like, uh, no, I was going guys, you've been seeing any Yeah, I mean, I'm I'm not. It's it's the it's the regulations and the promotion of them being used as a sustainable resource that ultimately brought them back from extinction. So if it's managed well and effectively and seems to be very well throughout the southeast US, then then that's fine. Have fun. I stay within the loss. You don't wear gator skin boots, I don't. You don't

have big gator teeth necklaces. I don't. I'm a biologist, guys. You guys can't do that. You can't. But you can't become like a guy with a gator hat and gator boots. And could you got a gator skull on your desk at work? No, they're in the lab all for teaching. I want one of the skulls bad. How many gators have handled Oh, can you set us up a big, huge gator skull, I mean a big one. Are the transport of alligator materials across state lines? Animal sites? Animal

Yeah for sure, Oh they are so so. But they just need to be because we're hunting. Some of us meteor folks are hunting in September. So but you are allowed to grins going to transport them, but you need to make But won't you just ask the question? Somebody just asked a question. Send me a big, old, huge games. This is my last question. How many gators? How many gators have you touched? Wild gators, wild alligators, crocodilians or whatever?

You know? Oh? In total? Well, we've caught fifteen hundred American crocodiles in Guanta Coste that are marked, so probably add five hundred or so onto that that aren't marked. And for alligators, I would say maybe three or four thousand. Damn, I don't know a lot. It is my job. Are those are those crocs in Costa Rica protected? Are they

a species that are used? No, they're not. They're not harvesting, and that's sort of a different great story in the sense that they're they're used profitably for eco tourism, so the management of those populations is also a renewable resource, but in a different, different sort of vein. Mm hmm. I don't got any more questions. Okay, is there anything we missed that You're like, No, this was really fun. These guys really need to know about this about crows.

I want to return to my first question. Okay, Oh heart chamber. Oh what was that? Like? Why they can stand? Well? Yeah, and that it was right in the same paragraph as talking about how long they can hold their breath, which I think is dying to know that. How long can they hold their breath? He's gonna give us some wishy washy science. Seven hours? Oh no, he did. I think that's an imperial Well it's all true, that's all true,

but no one wants to hear that. They want to hear a number seven hours I think has been recorded in But they do that by by circulating blood through the systemic circuit and bypassing the lungs. They don't actually have a fifth chamber, but they have a forumin of beniza it's called which bypasses the lungs so they can recirculate blood throughout the body, maximizing the exchange of oxygen to cells. Yeah, seven hours. I think that's a number

that has been recorded. But if I were to give you a real answer, a layer seven hour, something something cool down there. Somebody needs to like try to create like an external pack of that that, like you you know, instead of an oxygen, instead of that, instead of that, this would be cool. It doesn't bubble um. So so they got that seven hours under water. Oh here's my last question. I'm going back to my first question. You know those a little stock tanks I was talking about,

to have him living in it. Yeah, let's say the rainy season never came. Okay, the water never came. He could feasibly live in that little hole the size of his studio. How long long time? Years? Okay, years, I think. So he's not like, holy cow, it's getting close if the if the water doesn't rise, I'm doomed. Like he

could he could survive a dry season. I think that if a prey item, and in that scenario it's likely to happen, waterfowl or some animal that needs water approaches that watering hole and they're successfully eating every six months, something kind of big that they can probably live for years and really they metabolically, they're just so efficient. Well, let's say that thing that, let's say it's a little

hole dries up. Then I think that Steve's question is that but he only needs the water because it attracts prey, or does the does the gator need water to survive? Yeah, I mean it's interesting. We like to think that all crocodilians need water to survive. But during the dry season in Costa Rica, you see him walking in the woods. I was like, how way far away from any water, like how many miles? Like we've seen him like five

kilometers from the nearest water body or more. But presumably presumably he's heading out looking for a new water hole. That's penguin the problem. Well, I don't know, Like intuitively, going up a limestone mountain escarpment would not be where you'd go to find water. But yet sometimes you see them up there in the middle of it. If he's up there where he eats something, if it came in front of him, he tried to eat me. Oh really, well,

I'm the jerk again. I caught him and so we had an aggressive interaction, but caught him up in the woods, caught him up in the woods. We were driving back from sampling to where we stay a station, a little biological station, and on the road we saw nine footer. Really yeah, We got out of the car, chased him ind of the woods, caught him, got her sample. I mean, those those are the animals that you really want to put like a SAT tracker on to find out what he's up to. What are they up to in the

woods up there? I mean it's crazy, But yeah, if the water hole dries up, I give him less of a chance. But again, you see, alligators would walk to go but yeah, whole of dry up and he would eventually light out. Yeah, yeah, he's out. It's gonna be like, oh, I guess I'm doomed. Unlike that one I saw on the bank. It just goes up there and sits down here,

strike out looking for water. Yeah, they'll walk around, and I think they walk around on land so much more than we give him any grud for got it all right for a real My last final one. If I'm down the floor with my kids and you know it's pawd nearby, there's eight foot or sun in itself, what's the best way to approach it? How close can you get and be safe, check it out, you know, let your kids get a good love, you know, worry it a little bit. Yeah, yeah, but but but be safe. Well,

the safe answer, there's a pair of binoculars. That's not the answer. You're listening, we're looking for. You want to get close. Say now, I'm liable here. I would say that if you stay outside of fifty feet of that thing, now, assuming that there's not a nest around, because nesting females that are attentive will not want you there, varying personality far out of their way to make sure you don't go in hear that nest. So I mean I would stay as far away as feasibly possible, and don't mess

you at the water's edd. I would use binoculars and don't mess around at the water's edd. Yeah, that would have meant that my childhood hadn't happened. Take the water's edge away. It was spent the water's edge. It's all you ever did. Yeah, you don't go down by the lake. See what's going on down there? Go rastle a gate. I mean a huge impact on yeh. We staid at that house down there and we were what was that

river that was falling bias that we went fishing at. Anyways, there was a dock and a some kind of a waterway, and you know, it was nice enough where you think, gosh, we could just go for a swim. But you can't go for a swim. You can, but you assume a large risk in doing so, right, I mean, nobody in the right minds gonna let their kids go jumping off the dock. I'm not gonna let my kids go jumping off that dock. Yeah, and when I say fifty feet, I would say fifty feet with a fence between you

and the animal. Okay, So follow up question, how fast can that eight foot or move on dry ground covered at fifty feet? They can move surprisingly fast if they want you away. I mean, if you're an alligator on not me, okay, No, I mean you guys can run away. But if you're approaching that thing, it has explosive energy and it can move pretty short distances, way faster than people give it credit for. Just stay away from it. Go to a zoo home. What are you into the zoo?

Look at it? But oh, if you want to get a glass pane between you, yeah, yeah, all right, so you probably don't want people tracking you down? Do you want people to get a hold you and say, like, here's where you're wrong? Now they can email us, I mean email you. Yeah, I'll be happy to take follow

up stuff email. I mean a lot of this stuff we're talking about so interesting, but there's not a lot of empirical they published on some of this stuff, you know, so so it's all out for exploration, a lot of it. And hence I have a job. Well, like if someone wanted to read some of your research, where would they go do that and find it? Or they can go to my website, they can go to research gate, which is sort of a yepe nerd repository for all things

that you publish. Google scholar is a phenomenal resource that the public usually doesn't know about, but they can search peer view literature using Google scholar and help bridge the gap between science and the public. Wonderful resource there, Crocodilian biologist Chris Murray of Southeastern Louisiana University. You can send all of your anecdotal contradictions to war he said today address it's just the meat Eater podcast at the meat

Eater dot does that live else? We've got our own email Okay, So when something crazy happens and you find a human skull in the woods, call email us. Then call nine one one right exactly. We want we want all your breaking news stuff. The meat Eater podcast at the mediator dot com. Who came up with that? Me and GRN texts about it yesterday? If you really need to know, Um, it could have been podcast, But I was like, we have that, but it's so but no,

I don't know. We want our own for our own hot tips, yeah, hot, and then and then, but don't when you want to have when you want to have anecdotal evidence that contradicts what you heard to day, Chris Murray send it to Southeastern louis Louisiana University saying I killed one that was eighty easy. You can still send that to us. I'll filter it, Chris, don't you worry

anything to begin with? She send it up. Steve. Did he feel about a biologist coming in here and giving relatively direct answers and not trying to get it good? He got? He did that little wishy washy deal they do. I can't remember what he was doing it about. Oh how fast they grow, little wishy washy. He brought home. He brought it home, he brought home. He he want up coming down with an answer. It wasn't. It wasn't all like it depends what about this depends and this depends.

It does depend, But nobody wants to hear that on here. So what I like asking scientists is when they're doing research, like asking what do they hope happens? Smoke comes out of their ears? What do you hope happens? Well, that's the whole point. I can't hope because I gotta be unbiased. I'm like, by no, you hope something that happens. I know, you hope it's interesting. Yeah, Like when you put a collar on the links, I'd be like, be like, what

do you hope happens? And they're supposed to Probably they'd be like, well, we just want to catch the data. I'd put it on and be like, I hope this thing turns up some crazy that's place. But I would never be able to say it. I'd say I just want to have an accurate representation. I mean, while I'm like, wouldn't be sweet of some guy in Iowa found this links? You know they're hoping, they're hoping it happens all right, thank everybody, thanks, thank you. Right, oh see your gray

shine like silvering in the sun. Right, all right, my right, sweetheart, we're done. Beat this damn course, dad taking her now one right, unbeat this damn horse today, So take your new one and ride on.