Nothing looks more contented than a resting alligator. The mouth falls naturally into a crumpled smile, the eyes half close in a sleepy sort of way, the puckered back looks as harmless as the papier-mâché maps of the Rockies children make in elementary school. The thick toes hug the mud like tree roots. Because their massive jaws curve upward, alligators appear to be laughing even when in repose. They seem caught in a great big private chuckle. And they do have something to be smug about. After all, they’ve seen the disappearance of the dinosaur and the Neanderthal. They are a hundred times more ancient than human beings.
Crocodilians, birds, and dinosaurs had a common origin about 230 million years ago, in the Mesozoic Era, when they sprang from a group of early reptiles called the thecodonts. Today there are three groups of crocodilians: crocodiles, alligators and caimans, and gharials (lissome, skewer-nosed animals that frequent the Ganges). According to the fossil record, there once were sixty-foot-long aquatic crocodilians and some that hunted on land and wielded six-inch teeth. In the heyday of huge, miscellaneously talented dinosaurs, they not only competed with, but somehow outwitted, the forces that killed the dinosaurs. Living relics, today’s crocodilians have survived with only minor changes since the days of tar pits and thunder lizards, and part of our fascination is how out of place they look. They are genuine “Mesozoic leftovers,” as George Campbell, author of a natural history of crocodilians, dubs them. And children are just as wild about crocodilians as they are about dinosaurs, which they lump together into one big carnival of monsters.
I was reminded of this on a sunny February morning in 1988 at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm, where I’d come with zoologist Kent Vliet and other researchers from the University of Florida to “bleed alligators,” as Kent called the taking of blood samples. He and his colleague Lou Guillette, a reproductive physiologist who worked with reptiles, were studying the effects of captivity on hormone cycles.
“When you capture an alligator, its hormones sometimes go screeching up for hours, then plunge for days,” Kent explained. “There are a lot of things we’d like to understand about their hormonal cycles. The basic problem is that alligators in captivity reproduce much less successfully than alligators in the wild. It might be a result of how densely the animals live. When animals are under stress, they produce stress hormones that block up the biochemical pathways that help with the production of sex hormones. If corticosterone levels rise, reproduction drops. So we’ve developed a threefold project. The first part is just to look at the effect our taking blood and handling the alligators has on their hormones. The second part is to look at alligators in different densities and compare the hormone concentrations. The third part is sort of a little background check to make sure that alligators in captivity cycle hormonally like wild alligators do. Throughout the year, we take blood samples monthly, sometimes even biweekly.”
This meant regular gator roundups, which meant first rounding up half a dozen or so people who were keen to grapple with alligators. Although Kent was a heavily built man in his thirties, with a beard, thinning hair, and large, powerful hands, collecting alligators every month all by himself would have been an ordeal. It took a lot of volunteers to handle alligators, and on this occasion Kent and Lou had six others: Debby, an effervescent graduate student in zoology with a mop of brown curls, known locally as the possum lady, because of her work with local opossums; Sylvia, a quiet, dark-haired Nicaraguan graduate student studying the brown caiman of Colombia and Central America; Barry and Jimmy, two outgoing blues and folk musicians and alligator enthusiasts; Kent’s roommate, John, a tall, thin graduate student with a lot of field experience, who spent most of the year in Venezuela studying the spectacled caiman and the Orinoco crocodile. Since he was soon to be a zoologist, I asked him what one does, exactly, and laughing, he answered, “A zoologist is someone who stops along the roadway to pick up dead animals.” Some of us had traveled together by van, along with the equipment; the rest had arrived separately. But there was no way to miss the rendezvous site, announced by billboards with paintings of giant alligators, jaws open wide enough to hold a lion tamer and his lion.
The St. Augustine Alligator Farm is the oldest existing alligator farm in the world. And that seemed only fitting, since St. Augustine is the oldest city in the United States and crocodilians are some of the oldest living reptiles. The farm was started in 1893 by George Reddington, the conductor, and Felix Fire, the fireman, of a train that ran from Jacksonville down to St. Augustine Beach. As the train wove through the swamps, people often saw basking alligators and they would ask the trainsmen to stop so they could watch. Fire and Reddington had to stop anyway, to remove alligators from the tracks, and one day they decided to round up the animals, put them in a bathhouse on the beach, and charge people a quarter for a look. The current owner’s father, a haberdasher, had bought the farm and another one in Jacksonville in 1937, blending the herds to produce a collection of the largest, oldest, and fattest alligators ever, and the farm had stayed in the family since that day. Most of the gators were caught fifty years before, and when we arrived there were acres of them lying so close together they looked like a relief map of the Himalayas. In one pen alone lived 128 alligators, whose average age handlers estimated at sixty to ninety years. Some showed white calcium deposits on their tails, scar tissue from fights. Most were old and scarred and a few were missing an eye. Not only was it hard to tell where one began and another ended, they were for the most part lying as still as masonry.
“How would you know if one died?” I asked.
“You’ve got to look for flies around their eyes,” Kent said, practically.
“When they die, do you bury them?”
“Burial’s rough. A nine-hundred-pound alligator needs a big hole. We had a big old alligator die here once, and I weighed its head—just its head—at a hundred and fifty pounds!”
Though it was a cold day, which felt ten degrees cooler in the shade, large crowds meandered from one exhibit of crocodilians to the next. Each year, a quarter of a million people made this pilgrimage to ogle the last of the giant reptiles. Munching on popcorn or hot dogs, they gawked at caimans from Central and South America; a Nile crocodile from Africa; false gavials from India; American alligators; saltwater crocodiles from Sri Lanka; American crocodiles; highly endangered Chinese alligators; Morelet’s crocodiles from Central America; smooth-fronted caimans from South America; broad-snouted caimans from Uruguay; Cuban crocodiles; African dwarf crocodiles; and Siamese crocodiles. Regular shows in a small amphitheater revealed the basics of “alligator wrestling.” But the most popular place was a shallow, swampy lake containing hundreds of alligators, most lurking just out of sight below the chilly water— and that made them even more frightening to many people, because they seemed to dwell in their subaquatic world as mysteriously as they do in our subterranean dreams. Raised wooden walkways led out over the swimming animals. Children raced down these platforms and leapt onto the rails, in a frenzy to see the huge, potbellied alligators (which have grown obese from never having to hunt prey), while parents screamed and moved cautiously down the center of the boardwalks. One woman looked like she was walking the plank. Another, bold with curiosity, leaned over the fence and tried to look underneath the boardwalk.
The first time I saw Kent in a National Geographic film, Realm of the Alligator, he lay up to his neck in this pond full of them, armed only with a five-foot cypress cudgel. Floating among alligators, he was observing them on their own terms, at eye level, hoping to decipher their body language and visual cues. Scanning the water for signs of submerged gators, he occasionally nudged away animals that got too close. It didn’t surprise me that a zoologist might wish to enter the alligator’s world as completely as possible. Not much is known about alligators. They don’t train well. And they’re unwieldy and rowdy to work with in laboratories. So the best way to study them is out of doors. But it was while watching that film that I first realized how passive, otherworldly, and deeply maternal alligators could be. They make tender mothers and languorous, sensual swains.
Alligator courtship rituals are lengthy and oddly delicate. It all begins with a female’s affectionate pestering. She swims up to a male and rubs him gently along the face, nuzzles his neck a little, nudges him with her solid black shoulders, and alternately caresses and gently pushes his head. Then she might bump him lightly or climb onto his back and slide right over his head with her full weight. Sometimes she actually mounts the male and rides him around the lake. All this to get his mind off unromantic things, like squabbling with other males or staking out a territory. Once he gets the message, he starts necking, too. There is much stroking of heads, because so many touch receptors group there, especially along the sides. If you think about it, this makes sense for aquatic animals. Alligators are creatures of the water’s edge who have dual citizenship in the wet and dry worlds. Though not technically amphibians, they live in a similar twilight of water and sky, and they are masters of the narrow realm where the two worlds collide. They touch to orient themselves to one another, the water, the air. Sometimes they blow bubbles at each other and cough gently. After a long period of weighty caressing, the male puts his head over the female’s neck or head, presses her down, lifts his front leg and hind leg on one side, and slides up over her. Mating involves maneuvering their cloacal vents (which lie underneath and at the base of the tail) together and it’s difficult to get them in position. The male clutches the female with his fore-limbs, embraces her, angles his head off to one side, and swivels so that he’s at a ninety-degree angle to her body, bracing himself against her back or pelvis with his hind limbs. He searches with his tail, and when he finally gets the tip of it underneath the female, all he has to do is pull his tail forward, draw the bases of their tails together, and insert his penis into her cloaca. It’s a difficult position in which they look like mating Swiss Army knives.
“Have you ever seen crocodilians mating out of water?”
“I’m not really sure it’s possible.”
“In the National Geographic film, you were swimming in the lake. Do you still do that?”
Kent secured the rope to one of the boardwalk’s stanchions. “No. I haven’t done that for a long time.”
“How come you stopped?”
“Because I didn’t need to do it anymore. Anyway,” he said wearily, “it was starting to become a circus. People went crazy when they saw me out in the water, up to my neck with the gators. I first began doing it for two reasons. I was pretty sure that alligators were communicating with subtle visual signals. Slight changes in body posture and body elevation in the water—things like that. But being on this boardwalk looking down on them, I wasn’t able to see those slight changes very well. I thought that if I could get at an alligator’s eye level, it would be pretty easy for me at least to see what’s relevant to an alligator. So that was the first reason. The second was that at that time I was studying courtship behavior, and I thought if I could swim with the gators, if I made up a fake alligator and actually went out and could stimulate them into courtship with this fake alligator, it would be a wonderful experiment. I’d be able to intensify or eliminate acts of courtship and see what effect it had on their response.”
What had he made the fake alligator out of?
“I took the skull of an alligator, filled it with foam to make it neutrally buoyant, painted it to look like a live animal, hung it on a big pole, and I swam out with it.”
“Do you think they believed it was a gator?”
“I think they did initially, and then after a while they realized it was a setup. I could never get an alligator to remain interested for any length of time.”
“Maybe the model alligator didn’t smell right.”
“No, I’m sure it didn’t smell right, didn’t move right, maybe it didn’t hit hard enough in courtship or something. It was really very interesting for me. There was a lot I learned. It’s remarkable how powerful those animals are. I usually talk about courtship being a very slow and gentle process; it looks like they’re just sliding up and bumping along each other. But there’s a hundred-and-fifty-pound female and a four-hundred-pound male in the water, and when they start to bump, you really feel it. Courtship involves a lot of pressing, which is extremely important behavior to both individuals. I think it’s because it allows the alligators to judge the size and fitness of the partner. The alligator doing the pressing can feel how strong the lower alligator is when it’s resisting and the lower alligator can feel how strongly it’s being pressed. When I played around with this fake, which by the way I called syn-gator, I could press right up on top of an alligator and I could actually rest the bottom of the pole on the bottom of the lake and lean on that gator with all my weight, and I couldn’t budge a gator an inch. And yet they dunk each other left and right. They’re immensely powerful.”
Some visitors to the farm found Kent’s experiment hair-raising. Maneuvering a fake alligator head, floating at alligator level in the lake, Kent must have looked wholly uncivilized to them. To the people of the Sepik River, in Papua New Guinea, however, the crocodile is an ever-present danger that they both fear and worship. In their mythology, a giant crocodile swam to the surface of the sea with the Earth on its back, and it continues to hold it there, above the sea. Life-size, meticulously carved crocodile heads decorate the prows of their canoes, which support their passengers the same way the crocodile supports the Earth. They wear crocodile-motif wristbands and other ornaments when they dance. After a head-hunting raid, they blow a wooden trumpet, shaped like a crocodile’s head, to signal their return and the number of enemy heads they’re carrying. A Papua New Guinean would have found the sight of Kent in the lake wearing an alligator head a small ripple in his large estuary of belief.
Kent had performed his courtship mummery in spring, courting season. In winter, crocodilians stop eating entirely and become lethargic. With mythic fright, people picture them as voracious eaters whose razory jaws feed a limitless appetite. But the truth is that crocodilians eat infrequently, perhaps as little as once a week in the spring and summer, and in the winter, they don’t eat at all. In the wild, they dig dens with their feet, mouth, and tail or they lie on the bottom of a lake or flooded prairie to await the warmer weather. They don’t actually hibernate; their metabolism lowers and they fast. It’s their dens that make them such good citizens. Because “gator hole” ponds tend to stay wet in the winter, they support whole communities of animals. Even cattle sometimes water at gator holes. These days, civilization inadvertently makes wildlife ponds suitable for crocodilians too, on golf courses, in real estate developments, and even in back of one power-and-light company in Miami, which was amazed to discover in its labyrinthine canals a nesting community of Florida’s American crocodiles (chiefly marine animals), which are almost extinct in the wild. But then many crocodilians are seriously endangered. Crocodilians come from tropical and subtropical regions—if one drew a band of their habitats around the world, it would be a line that at the top went through the United States at the northern part of North Carolina—and that means crocodilians live largely in developing countries, where they succumb to commercial hunting and mutilation. If the animal doesn’t have a commercially valuable skin, then it’s hunted by local people as a source of food. Or some simply lose their habitats to power plants and industry. Progress sometimes steps on nature’s toes, and there’s not always much one can do about it. But high-fashion crocodilian products are strictly a luxury item, and life, including crocodilian life, can go on without them. One needs a pair of shoes, one doesn’t need a pair of crocodile shoes.
Just below the boardwalk, a nose and a pair of bulbous eyes appeared through the duckweed scum on the water. It seemed a fitting paradox that one of the heaviest and most lumbering animals on earth should live under a blanket of the world’s smallest and most delicate flowers. Mixed with the duckweed there was Wolffia, an even smaller plant. Almost as little is known about Wolffia as about alligators; it was not long before that its flower had been photographed through a scanning electron microscope. Heavy as the alligators are, they depend on the fragile flowers for warmth. When the wind blows the duckweed down to one end of the lake, as occasionally it does, all the gators gather at that end, too. That day the winds were calm, a thin, even blanket of confetti-size leaves floated on the water, and the two dark eyes peering up at us like twin snorkels were coated in the greenish-yellow flecks. Kent ran to the rail and lowered a rope noose in front of the animal’s head. Carefully, he slid the noose over the head to the thick, heavy neck muscles and pulled up sharply, closing the noose. Then he lassoed another alligator. Now that there were two to work with, our team went into action, getting the hypodermic needles ready, the logbook, tape measure, rolls of electrician’s black tape, and other tools of a zoologist’s trade. Kent climbed right over the fence and into the lake, took the free end of the rope as if it were nothing more than a leash on a small Schnauzer, and began pulling the alligator onto a small tree-studded island.
“Could sure use some help here!” he called.
Lou and John scrambled over the fence and stepped carefully through the water (gators might be sliding along the bottom), and I crawled over, too.
“Watch your feet! Watch the water! Watch under the boardwalk!” Kent warned me as I followed right behind Lou and John, trying to place my feet where they placed theirs. Barry and Jimmy had begun picking up ropes and lassoing gators at different sections of the lake. A tug-of-war crew secured each animal to a tree, fence post, or the boardwalk stanchions. Pulling together on the rope, we tried to hoist our animal out of the water, but it thrashed about, waving its enormous head, and then suddenly hurled itself into a series of fast rolls, an alligator’s typical getaway move.
“Okay. Back off a little!” Kent directed as the rope spun in our hands. “Let him wear himself out a bit.” We let the rope go slack. As soon as the gator leveled out, we heaved again, this time dragging it onto the shore, where I tied the rope to a strong tree. Now the alligator opened its mouth in a toothy threat display and hissed long and loud. A real full-bodied textbook hissss that jangled your nerves and made your shoulders cringe. Hissss. It is the first time I had ever truly understood the word. What’s more, I seemed to have backed up. So had the others, all except for Kent and John, who made these trips often and moved deftly, with a kind of informed nonchalance, at just the right distance from the jaws, which the alligator swung in a wide arc.
“They can jump,” Kent said, making a back-it-up motion with his open palms.
What a strange, beautiful creature it was, with bulging eyes and stubby legs and powerful jaws and rows of sharp teeth and a thick white tongue and pointy scutes (the puckered armor that gives alligator hide its distinctive look). Each scute has a keel down the center of it, and in some species the scutes are arranged geometrically. Its eyes, especially, fascinated me. All crocodilians have a third transparent eyelid, or nictitating membrane, goggles of a sort, so they can see while swimming underwater. But they also have football-shaped pupils, which stay vertical to the horizon no matter what angle the head turns. Even if the gator tilts its head straight up, the pupil floats like a gyroscope, so vision won’t be distorted. It’s a handy adaptation. The secret to an alligator wrestler putting one to sleep—or “hypnotizing” it, as they sometimes brag—may be that when you turn an alligator upside-down you disorient it, disturb its equilibrium, and upset its eyes’ ability to focus. Naturally, it lies still, as would a human with severe vertigo. But another feature of the eyes has contributed to their near extinction. Crocodilian eyes reflect light. Cruise the Okefenokee Swamp at night, hold a flashlight against your forehead, and shine it toward the shore, and you’re likely to see pairs of red burning coals—alligator eyes: a perfect target for hunters. Other animals’ eyes shine, too, and for the same reason: There’s a thin reflective layer, the tapetum lucidum (Latin for “bright carpet”), which acts as a mirror just behind their retinas.
Once, in the Amazon, I went out in an inflatable Zodiac at sunset to “shine” caiman eyes along the shore. There were precious few caimans to shine, since, like the manatees that inhabited the river, they had been overhunted for food, hides, and souvenirs. The “baby alligators” tourists used to take home from Florida were really baby caimans. The souvenir-doll “alligators” wearing top hats and tuxedos, or dressed as doctors, lawyers, or professors (complete with pince-nez), tend to be baby caimans, too. But it is easy to confuse the three main types of crocodilians, which look similar in a lot of ways, especially if there isn’t time to check the animal out thoroughly. Here are some rules of thumb: Alligators have round snouts, whereas crocodiles have pointed, triangular snouts. Alligators’ nostrils have a space between them and look like an open V that doesn’t meet at the bottom (whereas crocodiles’ nostrils are closer together). Alligators have much less aggressive personalities. If you can see both upper and bottom teeth, it’s probably a crocodile; but alligators have more teeth (eighty) than crocodiles do (seventy). Crocodiles look speedier, more aerodynamic, and they are renowned for their savagery. Gharials are mild-mannered, fish-eating crocodilians with long, slender, graceful snouts and, sometimes, a big knob right at the end. And caimans look like alligators but have short, blunt noses. Within the order of crocodilians, there are about twenty-nine different forms, including such rapacious and unpredictable predators as the Nile crocodile, which kills more people in East Africa than any other wild animal except the hippopotamus (of course, this is a minor number compared to the yearly deaths from auto accidents, malaria, sleeping sickness, and AIDS), and the gigantic saltwater crocodile of Australia, New Guinea, Indonesia, and other places, which can grow to around twenty-three feet long and is responsible for some of the supposed shark attacks. These “salties” usually live in the brackish waters of coastal mangrove swamps but also make their way into freshwater rivers from time to time. Not only are they unpredictable, they’re athletic, and have been reported by locals to stalk their prey. These are the crocodiles newspapers like the National Enquirer often feature, with such headlines as “I FOUGHT OFF A MAN-EATING MONSTER WITH MY BARE HANDS.” In that sensationalized story, a man swimming near his yacht in the Solomon Islands related how he “screamed in excruciating agony as the crocodile sank its teeth into my back and chest and shook me like a floppy little rag doll.” The Cuban crocodile, although not a “man-eater,” is apparently not an animal to be feckless around, either. But there are also shy and retiring crocodilians like the African dwarf crocodile, the smooth-fronted caiman, our American alligator, or its cousin the Chinese alligator, which Marco Polo wrote about in the thirteenth century.
What we had now in our lasso was an American alligator, but it was impossible to tell from the outside whether it was a male or a female. It began a low snarling growl. Sneaking up behind it, Kent climbed onto its back, tucked his knees behind the gator’s front legs as if he were a jockey getting into position, and at the same time pressed the gator’s head against the dirt so that the mouth closed. Then he reached around and under either side of the jaws, as if gripping a big sandwich in two hands, held the jaws closed, leaned back, and lifted the head.
“Tape!” he called. Debby ran up with a roll of electrician’s tape and wrapped the jaws half a dozen times, then Kent set the head back down. It could still swing its head like a club, but it could not open its jaws to bite. Alligators have large, steely muscles for clamping shut on prey. Though it’s virtually impossible for even the strongest man to open an alligator’s mouth once it has closed on something, the muscles for opening the mouth are very weak. Kent was a strong, heavyset man, but holding a gator’s jaws shut is more a question of leverage than sheer muscle. The alligator lifted its left rear leg, tucking it close to its body, and Kent quickly shifted his weight, so that the gator did not roll. Then he slid a large palm right over the animal’s eyes and at last it quieted.
“Want to hold the eyes?” he asked me. Kneeling on the sand right beside the taped jaws, I waited for Kent to lift his hand off. The bulging eyes popped up like a scene in a storybook. When I rushed my hands toward them, the nictitating membrane slid across from left to right, the top and bottom eyelids closed, and when I pressed, the eyes dropped down into the head. They felt springy under my palm.
“Amazing,” I whispered. To see how it happened, I lifted my hand just a little, felt the eyeballs pop up, saw the eyelids open, the nictitating membrane float from left to right, the elliptical pupils perfectly horizontal. Then I replaced my hand and the eyes vanished back into the head. Meanwhile, Kent inserted a hypodermic needle into a fold just behind the head and withdrew a syringe full of blood, which he handed to Lou, who labeled it and put it in a fishing-tackle box.
“You want to sex it?” Kent asked invitingly as he leaned back and held up the heavy tail, exposing a small slit, which is the cloaca, a cavity in which the sex organs lie.
Debby took my place as blindfold as I leaned under the tail and slid my first two fingers inside the cloaca, squooshy and cool.
“I don’t feel anything special in there.” My fingers withdrew covered in a heavy, sweet, pungent musk. Both male and female gators give off musk, and scientists think there may be both water-borne and airborne portions of it. After a gator bellows, there is often an oily sheen on the water all around it.
John double-checked. “Female,” he confirmed. But Kent had already smelled the musk in the air and recognized it as female. Gingerly, he climbed off, and Debby and Sylvia measured the head, the body, and the tail, calling out each number—27; 40.5; 39—as if ordering up a suit. John attached a small numbered band on the webbing between the toes of a hind foot. Kent painted a broad orange stripe on the gator’s nose with a grease crayon so we’d all know not to catch it again that day, and checked its general condition. Then he climbed carefully onto the next gator, which was tied to another tree nearby, and the ritual began again.
“Try sexing this one,” he said, holding up an even heavier tail. When I inserted my fingers into its cloaca, I felt a slippery hard length lying off to the left side, its penis.
“Mister Gator. No doubt about it.”
“It’s not so easy,” Kent cautioned. “A female alligator has a clitoris, and sometimes you can feel it way up in the cloaca, which can make sexing alligators real confusing.”
“Does this mean that a female alligator can have an orgasm?”
“Well, we don’t know. Don’t know about sperm transport, either. But there aren’t muscular ejaculations in the male. Crocodilians have relatively short bouts of copulation—twenty to thirty seconds—compared to other reptiles. To answer the orgasm question we’d have to do hormone levels during copulation, which would be very difficult. They’re pretty private about mating. And they don’t make good laboratory animals when they’re big enough to mate. They’d tear the place apart! I knew a scientist once who worked with monitor lizards in a lab, even had them walk treadmills, but gators are too stubborn to walk a treadmill. They’d probably just lie there and be carried along by it. So I don’t think we’re going find out some things for quite a while.”
Across the lagoon, a medium-size alligator basked on the shore. After setting our two sampled alligators free, we climbed up the railings and raced across the boardwalk. Kent just waded across, a lasso in one hand, looking around cautiously as he moved. John got there first, just in time to grab the tail as the gator dove into the water. Then Barry and I grabbed the tail too, and with all three of us hanging on, we managed to keep the gator from escaping, but we were not strong enough to drag it onto land. A rope around its hind parts might have hurt it, and its head flailed somewhere under the duckweed-coated water. Looking for the jaw, Kent inserted a hand straight into the opaque water where he thought the head should be, calmly, as if he were reaching into a vest pocket.
“Mouth is open, damnit,” he said, withdrawing his hand. Then he tried again.
“Are you crazy!” Debby screamed as Kent’s hand disappeared below water and the gator began to thrash so much it unsettled our footing. We looked like a scene from an ancient cautionary tale about wrestling with the Leviathan. Some researchers insist that the Leviathan mentioned in the Bible really is a crocodile. Peloubet’s Bible Dictionary says: “In Job 41:1 and Psalms 74:14, the crocodile is without a doubt the animal intended.” In Job 41, there is a long descriptive passage about the rigors of fighting the Leviathan, of which the following is a sample:
Who can open the doors of his face? His teeth are terrible round about. His scales are his pride, shut up together as with a close seal. One is so near to another, that no air can come between them…. His eyes are like the eyelids of the morning …
What a lovely description of the day opening its many veils just as a crocodilian does its elaborate eyelids. Crocodilians were almost certainly the dragons of yore. In Chinese, alligators are called tulong, or “earth dragon,” and the etymology strongly suggests that the Chinese dragon began with myths about the alligator. Knights may have fought large prehistoric crocodilians in the Near East, or they may simply have mythologized the dragons’ size and ferocity. Dragons were often depicted as fire-breathing, but in certain temperatures and atmospheric conditions, crocodilians can emit vapor from their nostrils when they bellow, and in the magic-loving eyes of the Middle Ages, the vapor might have looked like smoke. “We are ignorant of the meaning of the dragon,” Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges writes, “in the same way that we are ignorant of the meaning of the universe, but there is something in the dragon’s image that fits man’s imagination and this accounts for the dragon’s appearance in different places in different periods.”
Finally John managed to slide a noose safely over the gator’s hips and we hauled it up onto the shore, hissing and growling, jaws snapping. It swung its head at us in an irritated bluff but did not charge. Quickly, Kent slipped a noose over its head, cinched it up tight, and tied the gator to a nearby tree.
“You want this one?” Kent asked me.
“Absolutely.” I stepped forward.
“Wait! Get farther away from the head,” he said. “Gators can strike fast and—remember?—I said they can jump. Swing around behind it. Move in fast and confidently and get the eyes covered as soon as possible, and be sure to keep your knees behind its front legs, so it can’t swing its jaw around and bite your leg.”
“Right.” In one quick motion, I climbed onto its back, tucked my knees behind its front legs, and ran a palm down its forehead to cover the eyes and push the mouth closed against the dirt. I gave both of us a moment to quiet down, then slid my hands under its bottom jaw and quickly grabbed both jaws, holding them shut. What took strength was lifting the heavy head up without falling forward, while at the same time holding the jaws tightly closed so that Sylvia could tape them.
“Hurry! Hurry!” I told her as my grip weakened. But once that was done, I tried to relax and soothe the alligator by putting a hand over its eyes.
“What do you suppose is going through its mind?” I asked Kent, who was preparing the hypodermic.
“Not a thing. It’s probably like a dial tone.”
“I see you don’t romanticize their intelligence.”
Kent laughed. “They have a little tiny brain,” he said, his eyes opening wider with each diminutive. “Even the biggest animal we work with today will have a brain of only about an inch long and half an inch wide. That’s a little brain. But they’re so capable at what they do. They’re so well adapted to the kind of life they lead, they just don’t need those higher brain functions. They’re amazing for other reasons. They’re perfect reptiles.”
“What’s the essence of being reptile?”
“Taking energy when you can get it and never expending it unless you have to. They’re just an extremely efficient energy system.”
“Mammals must seem messy and extravagant to you by comparison.”
“Mammals are extravagant. Mammals are high-speed race cars. Reptiles are BMW cars, and they’re really gas-efficient.”
When you think about it, there are many advantages to being cold-blooded and getting your life energy from external sources—like basking in the sun—rather than from a private inferno you carry in your body. That inferno must be stoked carefully and kept at a precise heat. An alligator can’t digest food if its body temperature is too low. We can eat any old time, and it probably doesn’t do us much good—it just makes us fat. The alligator can’t do that. Nor is there anything vulgar about relying on a heat source outside your body. Humans store information outside our brains, in writing. We help warm ourselves by burning wood, bridling waterfalls, digging up coal, plumbing natural gas. We must eat to keep our temperatures up, and most often we do that by heating our food to the steaminess of freshly killed prey. In our own warm-blooded bias, we see alligators and other cold-blooded animals as low, primitive, far less advanced than we, who lord over them as the pinnacle of physiological adaptation. But what a misconception that is. They are not less well adapted than we are because they’re cold-blooded; they’re just highly developed in different directions. They are merely another one of the many treats of being, another way in which matter declares itself. And if we weren’t such chauvinists, we would admire how being cold-blooded allows them to seek out niches in which we are incapable of living. Some years ago, naturalist Harvey Pough worked out that it would be impossible for mammals to maintain a body size as small as a little frog’s or fish’s, perhaps only two and a half to three millimeters long. Our sort of metabolic system just couldn’t manage it. It is impossible for us to have an elongated body, like a snake’s, lizard’s, or salamander’s, because we’d lose too much heat. Our metabolic rate would need to be gigantic to keep that long body warm. There are many pluses to being cold-blooded that we highhandedly ignore. One is that it allows reptiles to be as efficient as alligators, which may catch only three or four good meals a year at best and the rest of the time not worry about eating. They lose little energy, because they’re not hot-rodding around the landscape, busily burning up their energy stores. Even when warm-blooded animals lie still or sleep, they are at fast rev, burning up energy to maintain body heat. If we mammals don’t get something to eat every day or two, our temperature drops, all our signs fall off, and we begin to starve. Living at biological red alert, it’s not surprising how obsessed we are with food; I’m just amazed we don’t pace and fret about it all the time.
“One big problem for scientists,” Kent said, “is that it’s hard for us, who are built on a very fast time clock, to perceive cause and effect in alligator behavior, because they’re built on a slower clock. This is especially true in winter. I say something to you and you respond immediately. When an alligator says something to another alligator, it may be fifteen or twenty minutes before the other responds. You really have to be paying attention to see the cause and effect in their behavior, since it’s on a very different time scale from the one we’re used to. This poses a real problem for researchers. It’s very difficult, as a warm-blooded animal, to understand the behavior of a cold-blooded one.”
When they saw our troupe of gator handlers at work, children begged to join in. Why are children charmed, obsessed even, by such violent predators as crocodilians and sharks, which aren’t at all cute and cuddly? Indeed, some of these species tear their victims apart with melodramatic savagery. Alligators usually do this while rolling, and two may grab the same animal and roll in opposite directions to rip it apart. Dinosaurs, at least, are so big that they defy a child’s comprehension. Children play with them as little things, as toys. In museums, they do see them full-size, but only as skeletons or mummified, not alive. So the monsters stay totally mythic and, above all, dead, sealed forever in the safety zone of the past. But alligators and crocodiles are massively alive, and children would climb right into the water with them and try to play if their parents didn’t prevent it. On the other hand, adults often asked us what we were being paid (nothing), then shuddered and yelled to us across the lake: “There isn’t enough money in the world to make me do that!” As a final gesture, one man swatted the air with a hand, slamming an invisible door shut on the whole idea, and said: “I’d never do that. No way. I mean never!” But, leaning against the wooden rails of the boardwalk, he shielded the sun from his eyes and continued watching us for hours. Each time I looked up, he was there, quietly shaking his head no, as if in answer to some prolonged question.
Sitting on an alligator is an ideal way to learn about its anatomy. Some people think that “alligators wear a built-in ugly job,” as one writer puts it. If so, they haven’t looked at one very closely. Alligators have beautiful undulating skin, which feels dense, spongy, and solid, like the best eraser. And they’re full of anatomical surprises. Their nostrils are surrounded by strong muscles. Leaning forward, I touched the nostrils with the tips of my fingers, and in response, they squeezed closed and then opened again. An alligator is efficient underwater, aerodynamic and sleek. Not only does it retract its eyes, it can close its nostrils, tuck in the two spongy musk glands under its neck, close its movable ear lids, and seal off its throat with a wide drape of flesh. The throat drape is especially important, so that it doesn’t drown when it drags its prey underwater. Though it has a four-chambered heart, it can reroute the blood and stop circulation to the lungs while it’s submerged. An alligator should have an excellent sense of smell, because it can close off the glottis and throat, isolate the nostrils, and direct a small sniff of air straight into the olfactory chamber, right next to the brain’s olfactory lobe. That a creature so beautiful, wild, and mysterious could be turned into a handbag or pair of shoes gave me a slow chill.
Kent drew a wide stripe of orange grease crayon down the gator’s nose.
“Can alligators smell as well as sharks can?”
“Oh no, they don’t smell nearly that well,” Kent said. “I mean, they aren’t smelling anything in the water; they smell only airborne particles. Their nostrils are closed underwater.”
“So if you cut yourself in the lake, they couldn’t home in on the blood?”
“Not unless maybe they could taste it. You know, they don’t have any lips, so stuff goes in their mouth very easily. They have pretty good sight, their hearing is pretty good. I wouldn’t say that they were highly evolved in any of their senses, but they’re very fine predators because they’re generalists. All of their senses are good. I think that’s the key to their survival.”
“Generalists make the best predators? Have you told that to your department chairman?”
“I bet he already knows it.”
Running one hand along the yellow side of the alligator’s jaw, I caressed the black speckled touch receptors. Its mouth quivered a little as I lightly touched a protruding tooth. When you look down on an alligator, if you let your sense of perspective go, you’ll swear you’re flying over the Rockies at thirty thousand feet. Its back is covered in miniature mountain ranges: horny plates that pucker and interfold and are geometrically arranged. Only the top of the alligator is full of these spiky ridges. Alligator-hide apparel is made from the smooth, soft belly skin. By wearing their skins on our feet and over our shoulders like talismans, I suppose we domesticate them in a symbolic way. Some people even carry alligator briefcases and luggage, in which they tame parts of their lives.
Peter Brazaitis, superintendent of reptiles at the Bronx Zoo, had told me a little about the history of marketing crocodilian hides when I spoke with him earlier in New York. A slender, lightly tanned middle-aged man, wearing a khaki shirt and earth-brown trousers with a brass belt buckle in the shape of a sea turtle, he had sat down at a conference table in front of a National Geographic wall map of the world. On a nearby counter, a small, tantalizing wooden box said simply LIVE ANIMALS, and had a drawing of a flamingo and a turtle, although there was certainly no way a flamingo could fit into it. Through the open office doors, I saw the back access doors to some of the exhibits in the Reptile House. On each door ran the warning: THINK BEFORE YOU OPEN. I hadn’t realized that officials of the Bronx Zoo wore large badges in the shape of law-enforcement shields. Peter’s number was 503; he pinned the shield at heart level, and it gave him the look of a knight. “Up until and right through the sixties,” he had explained, “there was a great commercial pressure to hunt these animals. For one thing, technology improved: Airplanes could get into very remote areas, so it became easy to bring skins out of previously inaccessible regions and sell them on an international market. By the end of the 1960s, it became clear that many species of crocodilians were on the verge of extinction. Some of the most critically endangered were the Chinese alligator, the American alligator, the Orinoco crocodile, and the Cuban crocodile; in fact, almost every species of crocodilian became threatened or deeply endangered. Any of the animals that had a beautiful, classic skin, which made the best leather, were right at the brink of extinction. You see, the industry would use a species until it was exhausted and then switch to another species and just go on down the line. At the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, CITES [the Convention on the International Trade of Endangered Species] was formed as part of the United Nations. The signators of its treaty agreed to abide by certain rules in taking some species and realizing that others were endangered or nearly extinct, and they agreed to provide protection. In the United States we went a step further. We passed the Endangered Species Act, and what it did was ensure that we abide by the regulations of the CITES treaty. In addition, we put animals on our list that we felt were endangered even though CITES hadn’t flagged them yet as endangered. Each of the countries that signed CITES became an enforcement agency, a real watchdog for the other countries. If a species was protected in Brazil, it was automatically prohibited from import into the United States or any other CITES country. And this is the way it remains to this day.”
“Surely that helped the animals.”
“That’s what one would think, and it did save a few species. That wasn’t the problem. The real problem revolved around identification. If you look at a live animal, you can tell exactly where it came from. You say, ‘Yes, this is the jacara caiman.’ But if you have it in a pair of shoes, you have trouble, because for a few of the species of crocodilians, there are no identifying characteristics you can see on a small piece of their leather. Being able to prosecute violators or prohibit or refuse import to a particular group of skins really depended on being able to identify that species in trade. Many hides came into the country that could not be legally demonstrated to be endangered species even though we knew they were.”
“So endangered species are poached, and then their skins are smuggled through other countries, to throw the CITES nations off the track.”
“Yes, they get laundered. By 1983, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Brazil went to the CITES secretariat and confessed that they couldn’t control the illegal hunting. They don’t have the money to fund forces of people in their remote regions. Also, commercial hunting is very well organized. The traffic routes for smuggling skins are basically the same as those for smuggling drugs—Singapore, Hong Kong, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia. Some nations decided to do a comprehensive study of the animals throughout Central and South America, to get some idea of what populations are left, and then work out regulations with some pep in them. This is a large, long-term project that began in 1985. I’m leading the team in Brazil.”
“Is the United States still importing endangered-crocodilian skins?”
“More than 80 percent of all [finished] wildlife products comes through the port of New York, because most of the tanneries are in Europe—in Italy and France. And, unfortunately, there are less than a dozen inspectors for the entire port of New York.
“Are they conversant in the skins? Could they tell what’s what?”
“Only up to a point. I’ve trained many of them, but there is a constant change of personnel, as in any agency, so there are always new people coming and going. If I were to look at a thousand skins that came out of a particular country as a finished product, I would probably be able to say with certainty which ones were endangered species only about 60 percent of the time. And if I can’t do better than that, and I happen to be one of three people in the world who has that expertise, you can imagine the problem.
“We can account for every single alligator skin that comes out of the United States. But here’s the tragedy: Once we created a legal market, we essentially said to the industry, ‘Okay, there’s no reason why you can’t use the skin commercially.’ Well, they started an ambitious campaign, pointing out that alligators were not only legal but farmed like cattle. That happened in 1979, after the first harvest of the American alligators, then again in 1982 and in 1983. When that happened, their advertising created a demand that was greater than what the legal sources could supply. American alligators’ skins, when they were first exported, went for $7.50 a foot for, let’s say, an average seven- to eight-foot animal. The same skin today, raw, is bringing $48 a foot to the hunter. Every time the skin changes hands, from the hunter to the dealer to the tanner to the importer to the manufacturer, it almost doubles in price. In developing countries, someone poaching a crocodilian skin can make a whole year’s income from it. We just made it too profitable to break the law.”
In 1967, the government declared alligators an endangered species, and hunting them, or even carrying them across state lines, was a federal crime, so Kent still had to have a license even to transport their blood samples. But by the late 1970s the Department of the Interior decided that the alligator had made an “amazing comeback” and demoted it from “endangered” to “threatened,” which permitted a certain amount of supervised killing, or harvesting, as it is euphemistically called. Most alligator people will tell you that it’s impossible for so many animals to be born in such a short time; so what probably happened is that the shy animals felt safer in the open once people stopped hunting them, and the swamps seemed packed with alligators all of a sudden. Nonetheless, the Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission has a “Nuisance Alligator Control Program,” in which it has hired the only people expert enough to hunt alligators—the ex-poachers it used to fine. As naturalist George Campbell once observed: “This is a little like hiring bank security guards from the ranks of ex-bank robbers on the grounds that they possess the necessary skills.” There is a law in Florida against luring and feeding alligators, since taming them makes them dangerous and more of a nuisance.
In St. Augustine, as I sat astride a beautiful alligator, I thought of the other treasures they provided. Their red blood cells are dense and large and have been highly successful in the early diagnosis of arthritis in humans. As effective as this technique can be, it’s a little elaborate; not many laboratory technicians wish to keep alligators around for the occasional extraction of blood. Thanks to Mark J. W. Ferguson’s research on palatal development in alligators, scientists have also discovered that if they remove an embryo or late-term fetus from a woman, they can perform surgery on the fetus to correct harelips and other deformities, and reimplant it in the uterus. The child will be born without surgery scars, because a fetus doesn’t produce visible scar tissue.
Lifting one of its stubby front feet a little, I separated the five digits—three with claws, the outside two without. When I glanced behind me, I discovered that the hind feet had only four digits, three with claws, the outside one without. The broad, powerful jaws evolved to crush hard-shelled animals, like turtles. The tail’s picket-fence scales looked very dinosaurlike. Alligators use the broad surface as an undulating paddle when they swim, but they may also use it as armament when they fight. John lifted up the tail, and Sylvia checked inside the cloaca. It was a female. She was a small, beautiful alligator, with healthy legs and loam-black eyes. Her skin puckers were still sharp, which was unusual. Captive alligators frequently get worn smooth over the years, just from climbing over one another. They act as living emery boards. And the alligators tend to spread, the way a human’s feet do in summer: Because captive animals spend more time than usual on the land, their sheer weight flattens them. But this little female was still relatively narrow-waisted, and as she shifted beneath me, her muscles felt dense and powerful, thickly resilient, like coiled steel or solid rubber. With the sampling and checking done, a simple truth occurred to me, one that I suspected was first commented on by an ancient Chinese sage: The hardest part of riding a dragon is getting off. Lifting my hand, I saw her eyes popping up slowly. Then the two lids opened, the transparent membrane pulled aside like a vaudeville curtain, and she grew suddenly alert. Jumping up while falling backward, I stumbled just enough for her to swing her head around fast and thwack me hard with her taped jaw. A large bump started to swell on my shin. Kent wagged a Didn’t-I-tell-you-to-be-careful finger at me.
“Nothing bruises as bad as alligators bruise,” he said, comfortingly. “When they get you, the bruise stays for four or five weeks. Figure they’re hitting you with a solid club made of bone.”
With a snake-handler’s long pole, he loosened the rope and slid it over the alligator’s head. Then John pulled the tape off her jaws. Suddenly, she pressed up onto her toes and started to trot, in what’s called a high walk, back into the water. The team of wranglers moved down the shore to the next two animals, while I sat on a tree stump, rubbing my shin and scouting the water for the female we had just set free. In a moment, she surfaced a few yards away. Floating parallel to the shore, with just her nose and eyes showing, she watched me and I watched her.
We don’t encounter crocodilians much in our daily lives. But they’re often on our minds. When we dub someone a “creep,” we’re comparing him to something reptilian, vaguely snake- or alligator-like, and we may go on to call him “low-down,” “thick-skinned,” or “cold-blooded.” The cad might even cry “crocodile tears” and make our skin “crawl.” “Later, alligator,” we still sometimes say by way of goodbye, even if it is part of a phrase made popular decades ago. There are all those goofy-looking alligators on tennis shirts. Why should the alligator become the mascot of country clubism? Athletes drink Gatorade for stamina. Despite our passion for totemic terms of endearment—my little chipmunk, my little pussycat, etc.—crocodilians never seem to enter into our menagerie of affection. My little alligator?—I doubt it. For W. C. Fields, maybe. My little saltwater crocodile?—Probably not. Though crocodilians are the pinnacle of the class of animals known as reptiles, we often read about our “reptilian brain,” that haunt of warlike emotions and throbbing irrationality, den of our darkest motives. But probably the best-known crocodilian ever is the one in J. M. Barriens deliciously silly and wise classic, Peter Pan. As you may remember, the crocodile had swallowed a clock, so “the way you got the time on the island was to find the crocodile, then stay near him till the clock struck.” Of course, he had also swallowed Captain Hook’s severed arm, and as Hook lamented: “Followed me ever since, from sea to sea and from land to land, licking its lips for the rest of me.” This presupposes a certain endearing ideé fixe on the part of the crocodile, but in a world where small children can “sniff danger” in their sleep, revenge is the least one can expect of reptiles. Crocodilians are often seen as con men, sleight-of-jaw artists. One minute you think a log is floating beside you, the next, it’s dragging you underwater. Crocodilians don’t fight fair—that is, aboveground. Instead, they appear almost magically, as if conjured into being, and carry you off to an underwater realm where they have all the advantages. And once they do grab you, there’s no negotiating. The jaws are sealed like a crypt. Still, crocodilians don’t figure much in monster films, but that’s probably because filmmakers don’t realize, for example, that crocodilians can run short distances on land and have been observed climbing six-foot-high chain-link fences.
This is all just as well, because people are frightened enough of crocodilians. When the famous naturalist William Bartram explored Florida two hundred years ago, he wrote: “The alligators were in such incredible numbers, and so close together from shore to shore, that it would have been easy to walk across their heads, had the animals been harmless.” Ever since, cartoonists and writers of adventure sagas have been obsessed with the idea of people running over alligator heads. This really isn’t possible, as the experience of a Stuntman on the James Bond film Live and Let Die showed. To film Bond running across the heads of alligators, handlers tied the alligators’ bodies together to form a living raft. However, Roger Moore’s stand-in kept slipping between the heads, where he got bitten. They did repeated takes of the scene and finally ended up having to patch together both the scene and the stand-in.
As a lassoed alligator flailed in the water, palm fronds swayed nearby. A dozen white egrets flew from a tree. The alligators had turned the lake into a sanctuary for birds that did not have to worry about prowling raccoons, cats, or other predators, including the overfed alligators, which in turn did not need to bother with hunting. They were fed processed meat with vitamins, not live chickens or nutria or other game. It is against the law to feed live animals to other animals in public. So tourists don’t get to see zoo animals as what they really are. But then most people do not want to see that anyway.
“Lordy, he’s big,” Kent said as he straddled the back, struggling to hold the colossal jaws tight for Steve to tape. “I know this guy. He’s a dominant male. I saw him the day he busted his nose in a fight.” The usually rounded nose had a piece missing and looked like an M. His neck muscles hung large as Christmas wreaths. His mottled black skin shone with crusted mud. Right at the end of his tail, a round hole, which had once held a tag, looked as if ready for an oversize key chain. Though Kent recognized the animal, we performed all the tests anyway. Lou got a syringe ready, which was a little awkward since he had a large white bandage on one finger. Although he got the cut in his laboratory, people assumed he was bitten by an alligator, and for the fourth time that morning, he yelled to a concerned visitor that, Yes, he was okay, No, he didn’t need to be rushed to a hospital. No, he hadn’t been wounded by a renegade alligator. Reaching inside the cloaca, I confirmed that it was a male. John patted his pockets, looking for the tape measure. Twelve noon. A cannon fired at a nearby fort. Then the sound of distant thunder filled the air. In the delft-blue sky, one small cloud floated and the sun was tough as an anvil. A slow-motion thought occurred. I had just heard bellowing. The noon cannon had set them off. I remembered reading that when a space shuttle flew over a few years earlier, making two sonic booms, all the alligators had looked up and begun a furious reply.
“Where’s that coming from?” I asked quickly.
Kent handed the syringe of blood to Lou and pointed across the lake. “Better hurry. But approach quietly when you get in range.” Kent knew that more than anything I wanted to see the water dance, the strange subsonic upside-down rain that alligators make when they bellow. Sprinting through the trees and bushes, I climbed a cyclone fence, ran down a pathway, and slowed up when I got to a tree-studded enclosure with a sinuous stream and a wide beach for basking, where nearly 150 alligators lolled in and out of the sun. A high wooden fence corralled them. Quietly, I climbed in, crouched at a safe distance, and watched. Surely they had seen me, but they were used to wet, mud-caked handlers, and anyway, these alligators were well-fed, laissez-faire animals who did not go looking for trouble. They just slithered into slightly different positions. Sun streamed through the trees as the gators languidly floated around and on top of one another, drifted apart, climbed onto land, crawled into the shade, and slid back into the water, where scaley tails and backs slowly shuffled. It was like watching the breaking up and reassembly of ancient continents. A white tooth lying in the sand at my foot caught my eye, and I picked it up. Because alligator teeth are large and hollow, colonials used to fill them with gunpowder. Now I saw that the sand was littered with teeth. Alligators lose teeth throughout their lives, and new teeth push up from the socket to replace the old. In their lifespan, which parallels a human’s, they may have as many as three thousand teeth.
A large alligator stretched high out of the water, swinging its tail as a counterweight, so it could lift its enormous head. Then it puffed up its throat, and the tail flagged like an Irish setter’s. A thundering bellow filled the air like distant war games, and the water danced high all around its body in an effervescent fountain full of sparkle in the sunlight. Another alligator rose up with tail waving, gulped hugely, dropped down, tensed up, then the water frizzled all around it, as if someone were spraying atomizers full of diamonds, and at last it bellowed. Few sights and sounds are as astonishing.
We may see the water dance, but alligators hear the ultrasonic signal, made only by male alligators, for some as yet unknown purpose. They use it in courtship, but also among other males, perhaps to assert their dominance. It may, in part, be the simple outcry that all animals seem to make (and humans, too) when, driven by some deep-down cosmic loneliness, they bay at the moon or croak with swollen throats, declaring to the bright, blooming confusion of the universe the ever-astonishing fact that they are alive: Here is what I am. Here is who I am. Here is where I am. Females bellow, too, and slap their heads on the water with great panache as males do, but they are not water dancers. It may be that females communicate in equally graceful and mysterious—but harder-to-observe—ways. Maybe the water dance is not simply a way to produce infrasound, maybe it is a signal in addition to the infrasound. Scientists need to be choreographers and code-breakers as well as observers. Who can understand the subtle semaphore of a glance? In that pen full of males, the response was instantaneous: Many twitched to attention or shifted their position. However, females read infrasound signals especially well, as if such sounds were billets-doux just for them, and they would by now be dashing toward these crooners. But whether they feel the sound as vibrations that make their scales tingle and titivate their yen to mate or hear the sound isn’t fully understood yet, because no one’s successfully tested their hearing in such low registers. Thus far, ten species of crocodilians are known to do the water dance, and it is always performed by the males. In fact, it’s the only crocodilian behavior—other than pregnancy and egg laying—mastered by only one sex. Some crocodiles use the motion all by itself, without the flamboyant bellow, effervescing the water two or three times in a row. Males never bellow without doing the water dance at some point in the general rhythm of their bellowing. But in the head-slap display, when they tilt their heads at about a thirty-five-degree angle to the water surface and slap and splash the water noisily, they sometimes invoke the water dance, sometimes do not. Sometimes they water-dance before they head-slap, and at other times they head-slap and water-dance all at once. When they get good and truly inspired and want the water to sizzle like frying bacon for many minutes, they can even do a whole suite of water-dances—as many as eight or nine. This suggests that the dance is a separate behavioral act, one they can choose to use whenever they think it necessary in the private agenda of their lives.
After all the bellowing had stopped, I retraced my path back into the lake and found Kent and the others busily wrestling with a male that had begun to hurl itself into tight spins. Its belly flashed a beautiful glossy yellow with each turn, and its neck scales looked like large green curds. How could anything that heavy float? But doesn’t the moon float? What is an alligator compared to that? A white, fleshy half-moon sat low in the sky, invisibly tugging on the water in the lake, the cycles of the female alligators, and the moods of us three women.
“Did you see the water dance?” Kent asked, puffing a little and trying to maneuver the alligator into a position near the shore where it would not hurt itself or any of the handlers. Before I could answer, something alerted him, and he turned quickly and scanned the opaque water behind him, which he seemed to be sectioning with his eyes. It was like trying to look from one world into another, from life into death. No amount of urgent staring will clear the water or make the forces that lie beneath it visible. There can be only hints and signs—a certain wavering of the current, a surface shimmer. People who walk in the woods come to know the signs that animals leave on the ground, but water animals leave signs, too. When I was in the Amazon, I watched pods of pink dolphins arc across the river. Just before one would surface for air, a narrow window seemed to shine on the water, bright and mirrorlike, and then a dolphin would leap right through the window, making a small soughing sound as it inhaled and plunged back under. The dolphin windows were signs I grew to search for, Kent read the water for small whirlpools in the duckweed, signs of underwater motion, but it was a false alarm. While the alligator quieted, we all decided to rest on the shady bank.
The sound of cows mooing, and then of a big truck struggling to get out of a mudhole, as I knew by then, was really the distant bellowing of alligators. An early traveler through Florida once wrote that the bellowing “most resembles very heavy distant thunder, not only shaking the air and waters, but causing the earth to tremble; and when hundreds and thousands are roaring at the same time, you can scarcely be persuaded but that the whole globe is violently and dangerously agitated.” Picture the swamps sizzling up around thousands of bellowing alligators, each male creating its own private water dance, all of them part of a dizzying group spectacle that must have driven the females berserk.
“The water dance was fabulous,” I said. “There should be a musical accompaniment…. Well, I guess, in a sense, there is.”
“You know,” Lou said as he fussed with his now-drenched bandage, “a lot of things can set an alligator bellowing. The American Museum of Natural History once proved that they prefer B-flat.”
“B-flat? On any special instrument?”
“Doesn’t matter. You see, back in 1944 they had a big alligator named Oscar, who seemed to respond when they strummed steel rods at certain frequencies but not at others. So one night when an orchestra was using the museum auditorium, they asked a French horn player to help them out with an experiment. He played a little, and whenever he hit B-flat, Oscar went nuts with bellowing. Then they tried a cello and the same thing happened. The instrument didn’t matter, just the right pitch.”
I remembered Alan Hovhaness’s “And God Created Great Whales,” which includes the mournful ragas of humpback whales, those oceanic troubadours with a song in their bones. Had no composer, I wondered, written a composition in B-flat for alligator and orchestra? Three herons swooped low over the water and disappeared behind a tall stand of ficas. A chilly breeze cut through the glade. Sylvia hid her hands in her pockets, and I pulled on an extra navy-blue sweater. If we had been alligators, we would have found a patch of sunlight to bask in. When the sun comes up, they sprawl in its hypnotic warmth; when they get too hot, they slither into the shade. Maintaining the right temperature is crucial, so they must constantly ad-lib, and sometimes that makes them seem a little finicky: arranging the tail out of the water but the rest of the body in it, or just the head underwater or one leg and the tip of the nose in the sun, the rest of the body curved into the shadow. The human equivalent would be taking off one’s cardigan but putting on a pair of socks and, maybe, a hat.
“This must be a far cry from your boyhood in Oklahoma,” I said to Kent.
“That’s a fact. There’s not much to do in Oklahoma. On a Friday night, we used to go out and find a pasture full of cows. We’d sneak in among them when they were asleep and push them right over. You don’t have to shove them too hard and they fall.” He made a toppling motion with his hands. “You should see the look on their faces! They don’t know what happened to them when they hit the ground. Cow rolling’s what we called it.”
At last, the alligator wore itself out a little. “Well all right, let’s have a go at him,” Kent suggested, and we began hauling it onto the shore, but every few feet it dug its toes into the mud and hauled back. For a tense moment, as my feet skidded forward in the mud, there was some question about which of us was hauling in whom and for what purpose. The alligator did not seem to be straining at all, just sitting in the shallow water and gently leaning back, like a skyscraper whose foundations had shifted.
“Whatever you do, don’t lean forward,” John warned. “Make sure that if you fall, you can fall backward or to the side.” As the rope cut into our hands, I was glad for the heavy cowhide gloves I had thought to bring, even though I knew Kent was right when he advised me, with characteristic understatement, that a “pair of gloves probably aren’t much help against an alligator’s teeth.” There was something faintly scrambled about wearing a cow’s hide to grip hemp (which the cow would have chewed on) to catch an alligator (which would have chewed on the cow). For the moment, it was a Mexican standoff: the six of us sweating and straining, the alligator hunkering down in the water, none of us advancing or retreating.
You’d think the alligator would have attacked us or at least run forward, jaws open, growling and hissing, in a grandstand bluff. We were puny compared with it. We couldn’t outswim it, outmuscle it, or even outrun it for short distances. But we had on our side one unlikely and powerful weapon. Alligators measure their prey by its height. To a crocodilian, a high animal is a big animal, even if in reality it’s only a lightly built child. Alligators can adjust their height by only a few inches, and they have short, stubby legs. So, faced with an overzealous crocodilian, the best thing to do is look tall and intimidating. In shallow water, stand up and raise your hands. Of course, the best plan is not to swim where crocodilians are known to travel and not to lure them out of the water by feeding them marshmallows and other tidbits, as people in Florida and Georgia invariably do. One day, their “pet” alligator, which roams a nearby lake or canal, confuses a white sneaker for a big marshmallow or decides to bunk in the house, and there is instant turmoil. That’s when the fish and wildlife commission is called in to remove the “nuisance” alligator.
At last, we dragged the alligator partway onto the shore, and it walked the rest of the way up the bank as nonchalantly as a willful dachshund.
“I’ve sometimes wondered about the fish and wildlife program here in Florida,” Kent said. “They basically just run roughshod over the alligators in this state. When they started what they call experimental harvests here, I did go out and hang around a little bit, to see what they were doing. I hated it. The people doing it weren’t just the ex-poachers, but other people they’d picked up for this harvest. I mean, it’s kind of a good idea to pick up ex-poachers. They don’t actually use people who’ve been caught poaching. If they have an alligator violation, they can’t do it. Most of the guys will admit though that they used to poach animals—they just never were caught The obvious advantage is that if they’re hiring these guys to kill alligators, they aren’t going to be out poaching alligators. So they’ve eliminated the poaching problem. The second advantage of it is that these guys do know how to catch alligators. You can’t just go out and pick up Joe Blow off the street and expect him to know how to get an alligator out of the lake. What’s not good about it is that people have been illegally poaching for a long time. Now you’re allowed to go out and do it anyway. And some of those guys make a lot of money off it.”
“Seventy percent of the hide proceeds and all the money they can make off the meat or any of the other products,” Lou added.
“Anyway, I just don’t think there’s that big a nuisance problem. There is in the sense that alligators wander and end up where they shouldn’t be, and you have an alligator eating dogs and stuff. But there certainly aren’t two thousand five hundred nuisance alligators a year, which is the number they’re killing in Florida. Then they also have special hunts, where they’re killing another one thousand five hundred or so. And now they’re establishing a new program, which they hope will increase, in just a year or two, the number of alligators that can be killed annually to eight thousand. That’s an awful lot of an until-recently-endangered animal. You see, their whole philosophy is that a wild animal is being wasted if it has economic potential that isn’t being used. That’s a rather mercenary way to think about wild animals. But there’s a sense in which I also think that the nuisance program, at least, is essential—not to protect people from alligators, but to protect alligators from people. Because people, whether it’s right or wrong, really fear alligators. They fear what alligators are capable of doing, and if the general public thought there was no program that offered them protection against potentially dangerous alligators, then they’d be much more willing to set up programs that were even more harmful to the gator population. It gives them a way to vent their fears. They kill two thousand five hundred alligators a year just to have a sense of security.”
Killing a token number of animals to work some sort of protection racket seems senselessly primitive and wanton.
“What do you do when you’re trying to discourage an alligator?”
“Before I started swimming with them, I tried to develop a few safeguards in case I got into trouble. One is that I never swim in deep water. I always swim in water that is shallow enough so that if I stand up, at least half my height shows—because I know that will slow them down, if not stop them. And it does work. I’ve never had an alligator go into a full charge at me. I’ve had alligators that were careening toward me, starting to go into a charge. I stood up—and, boy, they just stopped dead in their tracks.”
“What does a charging alligator look like?” I asked. “The only ones I’ve seen have been in movies, and those have probably been staged.”
“It’s a phenomenal thing. A charging alligator is incredible. It starts by swimming fast, then as it builds up power, it churns hard with its tail, its head starts rising up out of the water. And when it really goes, it lunges out of the water—I mean, its entire head, shoulders, and about half its body come right out of the water, with its arms folded back and its mouth wide open—and it just growls and keeps coming on strong. Then it closes its mouth and dives and hits what it’s charging at under the water and drags it away.”
“Wow,” Debby said, more exhale than comment.
“Why do they seem to be so crazy about dogs?” I said.
Kent laughed. “They sure do seem to have a thing about dogs. They really love them. I used to think it was because dogs are low prey that hang around the water’s edge, but I’ve changed my mind on that. I think they just like the taste of them, the way we like the taste of certain things.”
“Will they stalk them? Will they stalk anything?”
“They’re not great stalking animals, like some crocodiles are. Some crocodiles are very good ambush predators.”
“It’s a funny idea, thinking of them waiting behind a bush.”
“Well, they don’t wait behind bushes; what crocodiles do is sit way out in the middle of the lake. If they see you on shore, they’ll submerge and swim all the way to you underwater, and then they’ll just come charging onto the shore and take you out before you know what’s happening. In fact the guys that farm crocodiles have to continually watch the crocs, because if one goes underwater, you have to move up- or downshore fast—he’s going to come charging out, and if you’re still there, you’re in big trouble. Now, alligators can’t do that. They just aren’t built to do it. Occasionally, you’ll see one try to do it, go underwater, but then you see it popping up in the wrong place. It gets lost, you know, and it kind of looks around and goes back down and tries it again. They just don’t attack the way crocodiles do. Alligators are big crocodilians, but they’re shy and retiring, very passive creatures, even the largest males. Crocodiles, on the other hand, are agile and mean and fast, superpredators that consider humans prey items. Alligators just aren’t like that. They’re real pussycats.”
But very large ones, I thought as we watched the antics of the huge alligator tethered a few yards from us. Nearby, a smaller alligator floated, mainly submerged, only its eyes, nose, and back showing, like a small archipelago. A sweet, pungent muskiness drifted through the air. A heavy molecule that doesn’t diffuse well, musk was nonetheless easy to detect here at the farm, because we were so mobile—we could walk across the boardwalk, wade into the water, or perch on a bank. Surprised by the musk, I took a step into and out of a cloud of the subtle, lightly cloying aroma. Though many perfumes contain animal musk, most people recognize only the strong musk of a skunk, which really hasn’t the same quality as alligator musk. One of the mysteries about alligator musk is whether its airborne component, which we smell, matters to alligators or is just an accidental effect. Their musk mainly travels on the water surface and makes a beautiful oily sheen, after bellowing, head-slapping, or aggressive behaviors. We smell its airborne molecules at five or six feet off the ground, but what use is that to an animal as low as an alligator? This is just another instance of what relativists from Einstein to Benjamin Lee Whorf have always said: We see what our senses allow us to see. From our “tall” bias, we imagine that alligators throw bouquets of scent into the air, when in truth they may just be painting their odor name and intention on the surface of the water, from which light particles happen to rise and evaporate into the musk we smell. To truly understand the features of an alligator’s life we would need to perceive the world through its sense net, and this is where technology sometimes helps more than observing can. For example, we know a lot about auditory and visual communication in animals, because hearing and seeing dominate our human world, but much less about animals’ tactile, electrical, sonar, or olfactory communication, because those ways of sensing don’t “make sense” to us as profoundly. But once you have seen a bat echolocate or watched an alligator touch distant pond mates with its water dance, your idea of seeing and touching changes.
By midafternoon, we had rounded up the last of our alligators and felt about as bone-weary and nerve-jangled as we needed to. Alligator handling is not so much a skill as a willingness, but it’s not to be wasted; so saying goodbye to Kent, I promised him that whenever I was in the vicinity, he could count on me to wade in and lend a hand. Many kinds of people end up handling crocodilians. Kent, a university-educated and trained zoologist, was one kind; the wild and woolly ex-poachers another; the good old boys of the Louisiana bayous were still another; and then there were old-fashioned naturalists, like George Campbell, who invited me to pay a call on him and his “treacherous” pet alligator, Spiro, named after a member of the Nixon White House.
Early the next morning, I flew to Fort Myers to meet George, who was head of the Southwest Florida Regional Alligator Association and was often called upon to remove nuisance alligators from people’s backyards, swimming pools, and other unwelcome spots. A tall, slender man with long white hair, translucent skin, and a gentle manner, he’d loved crocodilians for most of his seventy years and at one point had had the largest collection of crocodilians in the United States—in fact, a collection second only to that at the Berlin Zoo. What had made this so unusual was that he’d had it in the basement of his house in Detroit. His son tells a wonderful story about his mother during those years. The family swore not to talk about their collection of crocodilians and other reptiles, as it was illegal to keep them in suburban Detroit. One day, when his mother had her sewing group over, the ladies all plugged in their portable sewing machines and suddenly thirty male crocodilians began to bellow from the basement. One of the machines must have hit a B-flat they found inspiring. Nonplussed his mother quickly collected herself and explained that the plumbing had been acting up for days, and to pay it no mind.
Now, George had only one crocodilian left from his famous collection, the stunted alligator Spiro, which was thirty years old and, as he explained, “the only alligator born in Detroit since the Mesozoic Era.” However, he and his friend Ann did have over two hundred animals that lived with them, right inside their house or in various outbuildings, sheds, and enclosures in the backyard. Spiro lived in a pen with a big washtub for soaking in and rocks for sunning. Though small for his size—only about six feet long—Spiro, George explained, had “a very nasty disposition,” and was “a better watchdog than a trained Doberman.”
“What exactly is a good disposition in an alligator?” I asked.
“Well, not this,” he said as he opened the tall fence and stepped inside. Sunning himself on a rock, Spiro began with a loud hiss, snarled, turned toward us, and shifted his weight, ready to charge. George kept a safe distance and backed out as smoothly as possible. George went to college, but he learned about nature the old-fashioned way, for the most part—by watching it. At one time he collected animals for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City; he started Trinidad’s national zoo; he worked in conservation for many years; he used to travel the world collecting animals (Ann once smuggled a snake into the country in her bra); and they still led groups of people to the Galápagos, Kenya, and other far-flung places. “If anybody can find six people, we’ll go anyplace in the world with them,” he said gamely. George wrote about the animals, and Ann drew them, for the books they coauthored. Together, they kept their own version of Noah’s Ark. Whenever possible, they acquired two of a species, a male and a female. It would take pages to list all the animals they lovingly tended, but among them were: bush babies, living in cages in their living room (one hung in a big gym bag); marmosets; flying squirrels; goats; donkeys; cats; cockatiels with red Pagliacci rouge spots on their cheeks; a big apricot cockatoo, which allowed me to stroke its sumptuous neck feathers; about seventy turtles living in a special turtle area; two burros from Death Valley; a Florida turkey, a knobbly-faced creature with scarlet eruptions on its throat, orange tail feathers, a speckled nose, a big black tassel down its chest, and an iridescent neck that shunted in the light from slate-green to orange (its face looked like the linoleum of a cheap motel); a Costa Rican squirrel, which had its own knitted blue hat to cuddle up in; male and female peacocks; an African puff adder; a Gabon viper; two diamondbacks; an albino corn snake; a Mexican pink-kneed spider; a black scorpion; a South American lungfish; two hedgehogs; Gouldian finches with vibrant purple swatches across their chests; an endangered red-chested parrot, which had a yellow tummy and a blue-and-green head; lovebirds; zebra finches; white-tufted sultan chickens; giant macaws; an African hornbill; and mynah birds, one of which seemed to live in a constant state of cajoling, as it repeated: “Come on, come on. Hi, baby. Come on, come on …”
In the kitchen of the main house hung a plaque with an ancient Egyptian spell to drive off cockroaches. On the fridge, held by magnets, “The Officiai Ronald Reagan Door Mat.” A five-foot-long plastic snake floated in the pool outside the living room’s sliding glass doors. Sassy, a green parrot, which lived in a cage on the kitchen counter, kept saying hello in various registers and with different intonations. “Hello. Hello! Hello?” A stone alligator basked on the patio. Animal carvings decorated the walls. Even the wind chimes had an animal motif. A spread of magazines on the living room table ran a wide gamut, from Mother Jones to Science A van sat in the driveway, SOME OF US AIN’T ON VACATION said its bumper sticker.
Over dinner, at Sonny’s Barbecue nearby, I asked George about his famous collection. “What kind of a house did you have in Detroit?”
“A red-brick colonial, in an area called Grosse Pointe. I had more baths in my house than Henry Ford had in his. I put them down in the basement, and I put the whole thing together and plumbed it. I kept the crocodilians in tanks, sinks, bathtubs—anything that would hold water.”
“How many did you have there at once?”
“About forty. Well, you know, there are about two dozen species and subspecies of crocodilians in the world today. Over the years, I had all of them. I’ve had every living crocodilian in the world at one time or another.”
“How could you tend them? How could you feed them? Did you have to change their water?”
“There was one important drain in the floor and if that ever got stuck, I would have been in trouble.”
“It was the second largest collection in the world, I understand.”
George set his knife and fork down onto a plate heaped with barbecued chicken and french fries. Despite his love of animals, he was not fanatical about diet. “There was a director of the Berlin Zoo whose name was Schröder, and he was the strangest man in the world.” George smiled hugely. “I guess I was the strangest man in the world; he was the next strangest. Anyway, we had a rivalry going. I was in international trade, so I roamed around the world a lot in those days. We still do—don’t we, Ann? And this guy would send me a cablegram—He knew how many animals I had and I knew how many animals he had—and say, ‘I’ve got a this-and-such and you haven’t.’ And then I’d catch up with him and maybe get one ahead of him. Then I’d cable him.
“Well, I’d go see him in Berlin every once in a while. He lived in an upstairs apartment at the zoo. In Europe, zookeepers live on the property. The first time I went to see him, I walked into this apartment. On every lamp and all over the ceiling—above the doors, hanging on picture frames, curtains, and everything else—were witches, little doll witches. This guy was ape on witches. He had hundreds of them in his apartment. There was also a shrunken head. Dominating the apartment was a Ping-Pong table. So the first time I went to see him, I said, ‘Well, your collection looks great; I see you’ve finally got a so-and-so….” And he says, ‘First we play.’ I had to play the damn guy at Ping-Pong! He insisted on wearing me out with Ping-Pong before we could even talk about crocodiles. He never would talk about the witches hanging all over. Very strange man. They tell me he is still alive but that he’s in an institution now. I think he should have been in an institution then. Well anyhow, he and I shared the distinction of having the greatest number of living crocodilians. Sometimes he was one species ahead of me, sometimes I was one ahead of him. This went on for several years.”
“Where did you get your crocodilians from?”
“Oh, they weren’t hard to get in those days. It was perfectly legal, for example, if I was going through India, to pick up a gharial or a mugger, or if I was going through the eastern part of Asia, to pick up Siamese crocs, which are now extinct in the wild, or saltwater crocs. They had them in the marketplaces often. I remember in Calcutta I found a wonderful crocodile in the Hogg Market.”
“How did you get them home?”
“In my briefcase. They had to be small, you see. If I stopped here or there for a day or two, I put them in the bidet or in the bathtub overnight, and then if I had to stay around another day, I’d put them back in the briefcase or suitcase and stash it someplace in the room, so the room attendant wouldn’t be snooping around, maybe lock it or something. I’ve done that with lots of animals, not only crocodilians. Spiro is all that is left of that greatest but one of all crocodilian collections,” he said wistfully, holding his fork as if he were going to launch it on some invisible river. “But to have had that collection was a kind of triumph.”
“What was it you liked so much about crocodilians?”
“Oh, many things. Crocodilians are a hundred times older than human beings, older than dinosaurs, older than flowers, even older than the continent of Africa.”
“What a thought. What happened to your collection?”
“What finally did it in was the growth of many of the crocodiles. Some grew so fast as to be dangerous. When a big Nile crocodile almost twisted my arm off, I figured I had had enough, and sold the collection to Ross Allen, who had a big farm here in Florida.”
Because we were planning a drive to Lester Piper’s Everglades Wonder Park in Bonita Springs the next morning, we headed back to the house and called it an early night. What with the raucous chatter of the bush babies, the chitchat of the parrots, and then the roosters crowing at first light, it was hard to sleep. In the morning, I stumbled into the kitchen, heavy-lidded, for organic granola and coffee. Sassy, the parrot, greeted me by screech-singing, loudly, “La Cucaracha.” When it got to the second verse, he went into a falsetto “la … la-la-la-la-la-la.” The air, redolent with the combined aromas of various animals, smelled thick and sweet, like the inside of a circus tent.
Ann appeared in a pair of jeans and a fresh white shirt. Her short hair was neatly combed, and she looked rested and ready for the day, which would begin, as each day did, with feeding the two hundred animals. It took about an hour and had to be repeated at night. And then, of course, there were the nocturnal animals, which were on a different feeding schedule.
“Don’t you ever find looking after so many animals a burden?” I said.
“Oh no,” she insisted as she cut up oranges and other fruits and prepared egg shells, store-bought feed, and various tidbits. “It’s wonderful waking up in this house. The bush baby in the first cage there is particularly glad to see me, because he’s my special pet. He wants to hold my hand. He holds my fingers, he wants to be petted, and I give him something to eat. And then Sassy sings to us the same way she sang to you a moment ago. Cyrano [another parrot] says, ‘Hello,’ and he’ll say, in various tones: ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’ Animals give you a lot of love. Not many people have that sort of beginning to a day.”
George strolled in, wearing a well-worn bush hat that snapped up on either side, and set to the morning’s chores, which he and Ann divided. By noon, we had arrived at Lester Piper’s Everglades Wonder Park, and helped ourselves to tangerines and starfruits fresh from Lester’s trees, which he offered folks free as they entered. In his eighties, a little deaf, and somewhat grizzled-looking, Lester came out to greet George warmly. They were old friends, with a common lifelong crocodilian passion between them. Some said Lester came to Florida in the thirties, from Chicago, to escape the mob, and began buying up every mile of land he could for pennies an acre. Though he was reputed to be worth millions and still owned large parcels of Florida real estate, he kept the alligator farm, his pet venture, in fine fettle, with the help of his two grandsons. For one thing, Lester owned almost all of Florida’s American crocodiles in captivity. Through overhunting and the disappearance of their habitats to shopping malls, golf courses, and other forms of progress, they had become nearly extinct in the wild, an American has-been. But Lester’s shallow-water enclosure was chock-full of them. Strolling through the lush tropical landscaping, where there were forty-foot-tall cacti, carambola trees, spiky-barked kapok trees, ficus, and other exotics, along with hanging moss (not really a moss at all but an aerial plant called an epiphyte), we passed cages of panthers, vultures, roseate spoonbills clattering their platelike beaks, and other animals that would have been more at home on the Orinoco.
“Well, look at this,” George said. “Assassin’s delight.” At one side of the crocodile enclosure, a giant overhanging tree offered its long, upside-down pink flowers, whose throats were fleshy pastels. “Angel’s-trumpet. Very poisonous. And just a little of it would send you into a dreamlike stupor. Look, some of the flowers have fallen into the water.”
I looked down at the crocodiles, with their long triangular snouts, fixed smiles, and dreamy languor. South Florida’s coasts were once full of them. Now they were reduced to this, a cement fortress at a roadside show, and lucky to have it. Most of them looked remarkably healthy. Full-bodied, with fleshed-out limbs, they had shiny, clean feet with all the digits, and no encrustations; their eyes looked intact, and their tails were pointed (not blunted off in fights). They lay on top of one another like rounds of pastrami, occasionally shifting their weight or lifting a tail or leg into the sun. As we drifted through the grounds, we came to a small enclosure filled with American alligators. El lagarto means “the lizard” in Spanish, which is where the word alligator comes from. Prompted by some private obligato, one pressed up on its toes and did a high walk.
“Looks like someone’s idea of a coffee table, doesn’t it?” Ann said. “You know, I saw one in Texas climb a nine-foot chain-link fence. A woman I knew used to go out to the water behind her house, lure this alligator out onto the land, and feed it big slabs of bacon. One day, all on its own, it just climbed over the fence and went right into her yard. They finally had to put barbed wire atop the fence.”
How do you call an alligator? “Hey, alligator!” a young woman yelled across the pen. This is incorrect. George and I glanced at each other with a shared secret. Our eyes quietly conversed: Do you want to do it? No, you do it. He leaned toward the alligators and whine-grunted “Umph, umph, umph,” in a swooping high pitch, with lips closed and throat warbling. Half the alligators turned and looked at him; some grew tense and ready. One left its basking rock and slid into the water. “Umph, umph, umph,” George repeated, and the gator swam up close at speed, eyeing us fiercely. There are as many variations on the best way to call an alligator as there are alligator hunters. Some say they have most luck by holding their lips closed and oinking. I once heard the far-famed (and somewhat notorious) Amazon guide Moacir Fortes call caimans with a closed-mouthed strident grunt a little more tubalike than George’s call. Crocodilians make a variety of sounds, depending on the season and their mood, and callers mimic their several sounds. But most callers have one thing in common: They are attempting to make the distress call of a baby alligator. Hatchlings make a characteristic sound, which tells the mother alligator that they are ready to head for open water, or, if they are in the water with her, that they are in danger and need help. Male and female crocodilians of all species will home in on the anguished cries of their young and fight anyone or anything to protect them. The adolescence of an alligator occurs when it passes from giving off distress calls to responding to them and trades the helplessness of the baby for the gladiatorial will to arms of the adult. Distress is the bugle call of their lives. We just assume, because reptiles are so low down the evolutionary ladder, that they don’t look out for their young, but alligators become diabolically protective. To save their young, they would slay dragons.
Female crocodilians are also splendid mothers. This surprises most people, and for the longest time it just wasn’t known, since crocodilians nest in out-of-the-way places, like swamps, and are terribly shy. But enough close observers now have seen females with their young, and even filmed it, to leave no doubt about their tenderness.
Mother alligators lay eggs in mound nests, which they build of mud, twigs, and whatever else they can find. Squatting over the nest to deposit the thirty-five or so porcelainlike eggs, they sometimes hold one foot underneath to break the egg’s fall. Then they stand guard, to keep intruders from the nest. Average incubation time is about sixty-five days. Fact: crocodilian babies don’t have sex chromosomes. A baby’s gender is determined by the temperature at which the eggs develop. Humans have forty-six chromosomes, with twenty-two pairs of autosomal chromosomes and one pair of sex chromosomes. But about two or three weeks after a crocodilian egg has been laid, the mechanisms that will cause a male or female to develop turn on, cued by the ambient air temperature. Ninety-four degrees Fahrenheit or higher produces males; 86 degrees Fahrenheit or lower produces females. Most often, one finds an entire nest of one sex or another, entire clutches of male or female eggs, or the nest is female except for the top two or three eggs—because more heat concentrates at the top of the egg chamber, and those few become males. Many ingredients combine in the ultimate equation that will produce male or female offspring. For example: where the mother decides to lay her eggs within the nest and where she chooses to build the nest. She may set up her nest in the shade or in the sun or in equal amounts of sun and shade. It could be that the environment, the ambient air temperature alone, determines which sex will be born. Or it may be that the mother chooses in some way. The female might somehow assess the population ratio and decide where to put her nest. There sure are a lot of males around, she might decide. I think I’ll lay a cool nest and produce some females. At the moment, no one knows. Much is known, however, about crocodilians’ response to temperature. If you incubate them in a cool place, they will seek to live in cooler temperatures later on in life. Lighter-colored hatchlings emerge from cooler eggs and darker-colored hatchlings emerge from warmer eggs.
A baby alligator has a sharp tooth to break the shell, but sometimes the mother comes, hearing its calls, and gently lifts the egg in her mouth, cracking the shell by pressing it between the tongue and the palate but not damaging the baby inside. It must take unimaginable precision and control for her to pick up the egg in her massive jaws and crunch down delicately enough to free her young without harm. Then she leads the babies down to the water, sometimes carrying them there in her open mouth. It’s not unusual to see a mother alligator with a squirmy hatchling or two in her jaws, ambling down to the shore. In the water, they swim around her and crawl right up onto her head and back, to sun and rest, or they trail along behind her like a brood of ducklings. Fussing with and nuzzling them, she keeps them close while they learn to feed on insects and small fry.
Sometimes a male and female will work together to build a nest and guard it through the gestation period. One often sees baby alligators sitting on the head of a giant male that is a holy terror to every other animal in the vicinity. Crocodilians have a whole series of vocalizations between male and female, female and offspring, offspring and adults, distress calls, etc. The young are playful. Alligators are oddly similar to penguins and other birds, when you think about it: They build nests, they indulge in intense parental care, and they call to their mates and their young. If they don’t have songs per se, they do have tuneful outcries and yearnings.
The first year of life is especially tough for an alligator. Yearlings are only about two feet long, and three quarters of them die, because many animals eat baby alligators—fish, frogs, wading birds. Once they gain in stature, they don’t have that problem, but then they have to start worrying about the adults. As the young become two-or three-year-olds, adult alligators start to chase them around, driving them off to find their own territories and families. A three-year-old may be only three and a half feet long when it begins its wandering. Sometimes people see them on the roads and in the ditches. Soon they grow to six feet, reproductive size. In most reptiles, and especially in crocodilians, puberty depends on size, not age. In the wild, they begin to reproduce at the age of nine or ten, though in northern populations (North Carolina, South Carolina) puberty might occur as late as fifteen years old for males and even later for females, who can be about eighteen years old before they start to breed. By thirty, a male alligator may show signs of senility and lose interest in mating, not replace its fallen teeth, develop mottled, rough skin, and even go blind. But a number of well-fed crocodilians in captivity are thought to have lived as long as ninety years.
In the wild, they eat every living thing their jaws can catch, from fish and insects when they’re young, to turtles, dogs, and other small animals. Like their relatives, the birds, all crocodilians swallow what are called gastroliths—a kind of millstone to aid digestion. Usually they’re stones, but they might also be pieces of metal or wood. Dinosaur skeletons have been found with similar gastroliths. Once, at a meeting of the London Zoological Society, a game warden from Tanganyika displayed the stomach contents of a saltwater crocodile he had killed. It included “three coiled wire armlets, eleven heavy brass arm rings, a necklace of glass beads, fourteen leg and arm bones from various animals, three spinal columns, several porcupine quills, and eighteen stones of various sizes.” In 1950, when the Cincinnati Zoo’s prize crocodile, Marc Antony, swallowed a Coke bottle, the zoo vet operated and found in its stomach lots of broken bottles, some marbles, bullets of various calibers, a porcelain elephant, and thirty-nine stones.
“George, what’s the strangest thing you’ve ever heard of anyone finding in a crocodilian’s stomach?”
George scratched his beard and thought for a moment. “Well, I know of one animal that died of starvation after eating a Styrofoam pillow that filled its entire stomach.”
Once in a great while, white crocodilians are found, with milky-white skin and pink eyes. Campbell has a photograph of a small spectacled caiman, found in Venezuela, imported to the U.S., then exported to Thailand, where a fancier paid the incredible sum of $10,000 for it. It was a pure albino, with pink eyes and floury skin. Unfortunately, this extremely rare specimen did not survive long in Bangkok. (Campbell also has a photograph of an albino male Burmese python, draped around the body of a large, stout, mustachioed young reptile dealer who lives in Fort Myers, Florida.) Such animals are put to stud. Zoos and fanciers pay the amazing sum of $10,000 per service. Because he had pictures of an albino blackbird, an albino turtle, and various albino snakes—and obviously relishes albino animals—I recommended to him The White Lady, a charming memoir by Leonard Dubkin, about finding and raising an albino bat. Although I wanted to see a large albino crocodilian, I hadn’t much hope of it.
My last question to George: “Do you think you’ll ever collect that many crocodilians again?”
“No,” he said, looking longingly at the collection of American crocodiles, which we had returned to. “Now I collect other—well, more manageable—animals. In fact, we’ve got a pair of miniature horses arriving real soon.”
“Don’t let them trample you in the knees,” I said as we helped ourselves to more of Lester’s sweet yellow carambolas, then returned to Fort Myers and said our goodbyes.
Back in Gainesville, I checked into a hotel on Bivens Arm, a lake that was connected to Paine’s Prairie. In Florida, prairies are marshes, flooded grasslands, and Paine’s Prairie is a state preserve that stretches seven miles long and two miles wide. A prairie is a wonderful place for alligators, and they were regularly seen moving back and forth between Bivens Arm and Paine’s. I yearned to see them in the wild, going about their business. I had heard that many nuisance alligators had been set free in the lake by officials at one time or another. Islands of vegetation floated close to the shore. Small gators enjoy climbing up on them and sunning themselves, but at that time of year they would be elsewhere, in deeper water (which holds its warmth longer). At twilight, I walked along the swampy edges of the lake. Towering oaks, reaching out into the water, dripped Spanish moss from their branches. Tall grasses make perfect nesting sites for birds and hiding places for alligators, so I held a flashlight up against my forehead and shone its beam along the shore, but saw nothing unusual, no laser-red eyes. In the darkness, it was especially easy to slide off the present time and place as if it were nothing more than a sandy dune, and I tried to imagine what life must have been like in the days of Augustus, when, as Pliny records, gladiators once slaughtered thirty-six crocodiles for the amusement of the emperor. Herodotus chronicles the Egyptians’ passion for the Nile crocodile and the sacred crocodile cult: “Each person has a tame crocodile; he puts pendants of glass and gold in its ear lids, and gives it a regular allowance of food daily. When it dies it is embalmed, and placed in a sacred repository.” Archaeologists found hundreds of such mummified crocodiles in the catacombs at Thebes. But it was in the city of Crocodinopolis where the cult reached its glory: Priests worshiped a live crocodile god, feeding it mulled wine, roasted meat, and cakes. Today, there are still strong crocodile cults in some parts of the world. When an elder of an aborigine community dies, his kinsmen cremate him, take some of his long bones, wrap them up in skin, and go in search of a crocodile, which they persuade to eat the bones. At that moment, when the bones enter the body of the crocodile, the soul of the person enters, too. From then on the crocodile will carry the soul on all its journeys, protecting it. If the kinsmen were to kill the crocodile, they’d be killing the soul of their elder, who, along with their other ancestors, roams the world protected by tooth and claw.
The next morning, I sat on my balcony, a few yards from the water, and drank coffee as I watched the fog roll across the lake like a thick lager and then lift with the first hint of the day’s heat. Alligators can live in unusual places if they have to. In theory, they could indeed, as the persistent street myth has it, live for limited times in the sewers of New York. It’s warm enough, and there are enough rats to eat. They could get vitamin D from their food; they wouldn’t need the sun. In the 1930s and 1940s, an inspector went down into the New York sewers and saw some alligators, as is well documented. But they couldn’t survive for any length of time in the sewers, only a few months at the most, because they can’t live long in salmonella or shigella or E. coli, organisms that one usually finds in sewage. Also, alligators live at temperatures between seventy-eight and ninety degrees, and caimans need temperatures between eighty-four and one hundred degrees. So if an animal is flushed or dumped into the sewer, it might well survive the spring, summer, and fall, and then winter’s cold would kill it. Sewers would do in a pinch. But alligators do have certain landscapes they prefer. And the lake was a perfect habitat. No doubt about it. In the distance, a flock of gulls floating on the water looked like a letter torn into pieces. On a nearby tree limb, an anhinga spread its wings and stiffly arched them forward, as if conducting an orchestra. The anhinga stalks prey underwater, and I could see one close to the shore with just its snaky neck and beak sticking up. A cormorant posed on a live-oak branch with its big black wings outstretched. When it turned its neck sideways, it looked like the Prussian coat of arms. A black gallinule with a long scarlet stripe down its nose hopped among the shore grasses. Any one of these birds would have made tasty prey for an alligator. Lifting my binoculars, I searched the water for the > that might be a gator’s wake. Then I searched the banks, where one might have been basking. A small tear in the surface of the water turned out to be only a leaf. Flocks of white egrets twirled slowly, parasols overhead. A reflection of passing clouds seemed to still the water, as if someone were smoothing out a rumpled fabric with one hand, and I seized the chance to scout the surface more carefully. A great blue heron floating near the shore started to flap, dragged its feet in the water for four touches, then finally took flight. It was a scene of gator-perfect serenity. As the day warmed up, birds perched on five fishermen’s stanchions leading from the shore into deep water. Mats of vegetation floated together and drifted apart. The water began to glitter like a marquee. One small mat of vegetation suddenly turned on edge, and I saw three connected pads reel into focus … The nose, the head, the back. Sharp scutes led from the forehead to dark eyes ringed in yellow and a plump, round nose. Arching its back, it became a gently sloping pyramid, a symmetry of line from tail to snout. Sometimes it just hung in the water, only its nose and eyes showing. Not more than twenty yards from me, it cruised back and forth, parallel to the shore, which it seemed to be watching. Like a floating compass, it turned and pointed, first south, toward a Chinese restaurant overlooking the lake, then east toward me. My skin crawled with wonder. I must have earned some Brownie points in heaven to be allowed a vision so rare. Was it male or female? I wondered. And what was it doing up so early in the year? Without warning, it turned sharply and headed back into deeper water, probably to find a warm spot on the bottom again, where it would wait in suspense for all the powwows of spring. Then, along with the other alligators, it would pop up to the surface, with four or five inches of mud caked all over its head, and sit for a while in a sort of daze, until the world added up and it was time to eat and bask and look for a mate. Soon, the alligator was only a small wake in the distance, swimming straight on for the far shore, where there were no houses or roads, only moss-drenched trees and the inviting forest, remote and untraveled.
“See ya later,” I called.