Swampy

In Christmas, FL, you'll find Swampy, billed as "world's largest gator". Of course, Swampy is a building, not a real alligator, and thus probably disqualified, but hey, who's counting? It holds the gift shop, ticket counter and offices of Jungle Adventures, a nature theme park.

Swampy isn't even really a building unto himself, technically: he's just the façade of a larger structure, as seen on Google Maps below. But we love him nonetheless, and hope the future holds better things for him than have befallen Annie the Dragon.

Citrus Center Gator

At one of those ubiquitous Florida Citrus Centers that dot the landscape around the Florida-Georgia border - you know, the ones who sell the baby sharks in jars - a billboard promises a "13 foot gator".

What they didn't tell you is that the gator is dead.

The taxidermied critter sits (Stands? Lays? Crouches? Whatever it is that alligators are doing) on a table, rather like an altar, surrounded by the gruesome visage of dozens of severed baby alligator heads. I can't think of many other animals where a display like this would be accepted so casually - snakes, maybe.

(Also, a 13 foot gator may sound impressive at first, but half of it's the tail and it's not as big as you probably pictured it.)

Tool-Using Gators and Crocs

If you were creeped out by alligators before, prepare to have the creepy factor raised: new research demonstrates that alligators are far more intelligent than previously thought.

For most of mankind's existence, it has been held that humans were the only tool-using creatures. Then in 1964, Jane Goodall first recorded chimpanzees using sticks as tools. Over the years since, more and more animals have been discovered to be tool-users: apes, elephants, dolphins, birds. And now this latest announcement marks the first known instance of a tool-using reptile.

According to Naples News:

Vladimir Dinets, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Tennessee and an author of a new study describing this hunting technique, first saw a hint that crocodilians — which include crocodiles, alligators, and caimans — might use sticks as a lure in 2007. Doing research in India, he watched as a mugger crocodile lay motionless in shallow water with an array of sticks and twigs laid across its snout. When an egret flew by to grab the stick, the crocodile snapped and the bird narrowly escaped. Dinets had heard stories of similar crafty behavior by animals at Florida's St. Augustine Alligator Farm Zoo.

But these were just isolated anecdotes, not subject to the rigors of scientific observation. "We needed to prove convincingly that the use of sticks was intentional," Dinets said. He started spending his weekends at two Louisiana lakes and discovered that the use of sticks as bait by wild alligators there was not haphazard. Alligators living beneath bird rookeries used them, while others didn't. Because the trees near the lakes don't regularly shed branches or twigs, this suggests that the gators were intentionally searching out sticks to use.

More significant, the alligators only used twigs as bait during the time of year that the wading birds were busy collecting twigs for their nests, from late March through early June.

This is the first report of a predator synchronizing the use of hunting lures to the seasonal behavior of its prey. And if tool use is rare in the animal kingdom, the use of objects as bait is even more rare. Until now, it has only ever been seen in capuchin monkeys, a few bird species and one insect.

There are at least 1.3 million alligators in Florida (and some sources put the figure at twice that), and while croc populations aren't nearly as great, it's estimated there are over 1,500 crocodiles in the Everglades National Park alone. Florida is so overrun with these critters, it's no wonder it has a thriving alligator-removal industry and a government-sponsored nuisance alligator report hotline. And the state has at least 30 alligator farms as well.

Watch your back and stay frosty out there, my fellow swampsters.

Alligator Wrestling

Florida's already been a pioneer in the dubious fields of bear wrestling and coleslaw wrestling, so it shouldn't really surprise anyone that at some point, some crackers would gaze upon a gator and say, "let's rassle it."

You can observe alligator wrestling matches in all its puzzling glory at Gatorland in Orlando and you can even, for a ten dollar fee, jump in the ring and wrestle one yourself. Me, I can't imagine paying money to watch such a thing or even to partake in such a thing, but on the other hand I suppose some of these rasslers can't imagine paying money to put a rolled-up handful of tobacco leaves in your mouth and set fire to it. To each their own.

But even kids are allowed to wrestle at some of these places, and that's definitely not cool. Parents, hypnotized by the dazzling circus-like atmosphere, apparently convince themselves that it's not that dangerous to let junior go out there and risk being eaten.

Don't let anyone convince you otherwise: it is dangerous, quite dangerous. A few years back, an article in Garden & Gun laid bare the insanity of the pursuit, mostly without judging but by letting the words of the wrestlers hang themselves:

Williams has “sat on more gators than you’ve ever seen in your life” and been bitten “too many times to count,” including once, during a show, when the gator’s teeth came straight through his hand. “The gator did what we call a lockup,” he explains. “He grabbed my hand and wouldn’t release. I told my backup guy, ‘We have a problem here,’ and he laughed and said, ‘What do you mean we?’” ...The force exerted by a twelve-foot alligator’s jaws is more than two thousand pounds per square inch, which is akin to having a Chrysler dropped on your wrist bone. Wrestlers have lost hands, had their heads crushed. Stitches numbering into the hundreds are not uncommon.

Despite the dwindling numbers of its hardcore practitioners, the art of gator wrestling has been "a thing" in Florida since at least the turn of the last century, and doesn't seem to be disappearing anytime soon. I'm surprised PETA hasn't made a bigger deal out of this, since they'll harass just about every other business on Earth that doesn't use animals in a way they approve of. But what with the popularity of dog racing here as well, may I propose alligator racing as a safer, saner, kinder-to-the-critter exploit? (At least no one here's thought of dog wrestling.)

Interestingly, according to Florida Memory, this most American of entertainments was actually introduced by the Seminoles. Somehow, there was a myth going around among the white man back then that Seminoles wrestled gators. When the Seminoles started marketing themselves as a tourist attraction in the early 20th century, they appropriated that misconception and played it up, staging alligator wrestling matches for the curious rubes from Minnesota to gawk at. And in so doing, they actually made the myth come true. Other manufactured "traditions" employed by the Seminole tourist traps include Totem Poles, Western-tribe-style costumes, and the Seminole Doll, which has actually now morphed into a bonafide cultural tradition with the passage of time.