Ologies with Alie Ward - Alligator Ecotoxicology (GATOR POISONS) with Laura Kojima

Episode Date: December 1, 2020

Alligators, crocodiles and … a shut-down nuclear weapons plant? The excitement never ends when you’re Laura Kojima, an Alligator Ecotoxicologist. A longtime reptile cheerleader, Laura has passion to match some truly bananas stories about field work, tail smacks, gator jaws, mercury levels, swamp boats, and crocodilian evolution, overbites, and locomotion. Her incredible work keeps people -- and the gators -- safer in toxic waters and she recalls her favorite alligator bite and the one animal that sent her to the hospital. Also discussed: jorts & gator crotches. [Audio note: the connection was a little spotty so please forgive occasional static!] Follow Laura Kojima Twitter.com/laurakojima and Instagram.com/laura.kojima A donation went to the WCS wild Siamese Crocodile conservation Sponsors of Ologies: alieward.com/ologies-sponsors More links and info at alieward.com/ologies/alligatorecotoxicology Transcripts & bleeped episodes at: alieward.com/ologies-extras Become a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologies OlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes and now… MASKS. Hi. Yes. Follow twitter.com/ologies or instagram.com/ologies Follow twitter.com/AlieWard or instagram.com/AlieWard Sound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray Morris Theme song by Nick ThorburnSupport the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Oh hey, it's that neglected hunk of ginger root at the bottom of your crisper, hoping you'll use it before it withers alleyward back with a very classic on-brand episode of oligies. Is it about a virus or a vaccine or anything relevant to your life? Nope, not at all, which is why it's perfect. It's just a murky bucket of slop holding glimmering science information. Now, I loved every minute of recording and editing it. I wanted to just send it off with a big long detailed and floored intro, but all you need is for me to just shut the fuck up and get the show started. I totally get it. And we will just as soon as I think everyone on patreon.com slash oligies, they make every single week of the show possible from the start in 2017. Thank you

to everyone wearing oligies merch that's available at oligiesmerge.com. We have masks, should you need them? And thanks to everyone subscribed, rating the podcast, and of course reviewing it so that I can read it, such as this review left by Argie, who writes, nobody will ever see this review. How high Argie? Apparently review number 12,094. Having said that, I would like to give that show this many stars. Argie, I'm right here. I told you I read all of them. Okay, alligator toxicology, is there a topic more perfect for the holidays? Yes, yes, there's a lot of them, but we don't care because Gator poisons. What's even happening with those? Okay, so the word alligator has roots in Spanish. El legato, meaning the lizard, even though

alligators are not lizards. Eco means house, and it comes from the Greek oikos, which you may remember from the oikology episode about decluttering your house. And toxicology has some dusty Greek origins, meaning poisoned arrow. So the study of poisoned homes of non lizard lizards. So much to discuss. Just quick up top, an alligator is a crocodilian. Not all crocodilians are alligators. There's 26 recognized species of crocodilians, which includes true crocodiles, the alligators, caimans, narrow-nosed garyls, and false garyls, but mostly we're going to be talking gators. So thisologist tweeted something about her field work and I clicked on her bio and saw the words alligator eco toxicology. I lost my shit quietly and then immediately tweeted that the world needed

this conversation and I have never been more correct. So she studied wildlife and conservation biology and is currently getting her master's in conservation ecology and sustainable development at the University of Georgia's Odom School of Ecology's Savannah River Ecology Laboratory. Her research involves tracking and monitoring toxicology of alligators in an area called the Savannah River site. It is a 310 square mile former nuclear weapons production facility and a current nuclear waste storage site in South Carolina. But in lighter news, when asked on social media, she has admitted that the celebrity she's most often told she resembles is Meghan Markle. So imagine if Meghan Markle wore a headlamp and beamed while clutching a small bouquet

of alligator hatchlings on the lapping shores of a moonlit bayou. So a cooler Meghan Markle. No offense, Meghan Markle. Also audio note, we had some mysterious static here and there. So if it seems like I'm doing extra sides, it's just me cutting out the bad audio like bruises on an otherwise perfect peach. Thank you for bringing with us. So buckle up your tacos, slip on your crocs, and grab a can koozie to get comfy for a conversation that covers everything from Nile crocodiles to airboats, hospitalizations, floating in a swamp at the witching hour, yeeting, milley rocking, chicken baiting, gator lassos, dipping sauces, flimflam about flimflam, radioactive fish, and so much more with alligator ecotoxicologist Laura Kojima.

I'm Laura Kojima, my pronouns are she, her. Great. And okay, ecotoxicology, I didn't know it existed until I started following you on Twitter. Confession. Oh, I don't blame you. I didn't know it existed until I started grad school. What exactly is ecotoxicology? So it's the study of nature's interactions with toxic substances that are introduced. Majority of the toxic substances are antigenically sourced, which means human caused. So a lot of well-known ecotoxological problems are ocean acidification that is a result of pollution, pesticides on pollinator populations. I'm sure people have heard about Save the Bees because of pesticides and herbicides and consequences of heavy metal exposure and ingestion, which is

what I'm looking at with alligators. Oh, so it's the junk that we put into the earth and how it affects environment and things that eat it and absorb it. Oh my gosh. Now, okay, on alligators, do they have a lot of like silver mercury fillings? What kind of metals are we talking? I know they don't really have dental fillings, but... I mean, their teeth are very questionable when they're in very highly toxic areas, so they probably could use some fillings, but it's really sad. But arsenic, cadmium, selenium, and mercury are like the four main elements. I work with looking at mercury in particular, because my project is looking at the consumption risk associated with alligators at my field site.

And when mercury is exposed to certain bacteria in aquatic areas because of the lack of oxygen, it gets converted into methylmercury, which is toxic. And I'm sure a lot of us have grown up being told, don't eat too much catfish or salmon because there's mercury in it. And so what I'm curious is whether or not there's a risk of eating alligator and being exposed to mercury as a result. Oh, do a lot of people eat alligator? How big of a meat industry is that? So in Louisiana and Florida, there's alligator farms that people will buy alligator meat. I know I've had alligator jerky my first time I went to New Orleans, so it's definitely an industry. I'm from the West Coast, so I know it's not as widespread over here in California, but in the

Southeast, most people have had gator or even turtle, something that to me would be kind of out of the ordinary. And in South Carolina, where I'm doing my research, people apply for hunting permits annually to hunt alligator and consume the meat. It definitely is more common than you would think. Does it taste like chicken? I did not like it when I had it. It was very fishy when I had alligator jerky, but from everyone else I've talked to who said it tastes like chicken, so I don't know. Okay, side note. So folks have been eating alligator tail for centuries on this continent, long before it was called Alligator Mississipiensis, before colonization, before alligator wrestling popped up in roadside attractions, before alligators being declared

endangered in 1973, and before their rebound and farming. So as for alligators on your refined palate, imagine a chicken that lives in the ocean. Also alligator tail meat, that's going to run you about $20 a pound, so just a few dollars shy of the price of lobster meat, so it's fancy and funky. I think it's probably all about the dip in sauce, because whatever chicken is just like, it really just tastes like ranch or barbecue or hot wings. Exactly. I definitely plan on trying actual well-cooked alligator meat and not just something from a farmer's market in New Orleans, but mass-producing selling. And how big do these alligators get? How honking are we talking? Oh my goodness, they can get really big. I have had an encounter with an alligator that

was missing half its tail, but he was full-grown, and with only half his tail he was over 10 and a half feet. We actually caught him in a trap twice, and we named him Jabba because he just looked like Jabba the Hutt, which is so fat. But you're able to measure their total length, even if they're missing part of their tail, by doubling their snout to their cloaca, which is where they pee and reproduce. You may remember the cloaca from any of our bird or herb episodes, and yes, it's the one-stop-shop for peeing, eggs, sperm, poo, you name it. And I've oft said that if Steve Jobs designed a butthole, it would be a cloaca. It's streamlined, it's simple, it's clean. It's not always clean, but that's probably an individual thing. Anyway, cloaca,

find them at the underside base of the tail, which is pretty long. And so with that being doubled, he was, I believe, 12.7 feet if he had his full tail, but alligators can get up to 14 feet. Oh, well, how did they lose their tails? I imagine they don't just like snap off like a fence lizard, right? No, not at all. So alligators are extremely aggressive and towards each other. I think I would be scared to be in the middle of an alligator fight. Males are just very territorial, and so likely what we think happened was Jabba got in a fight in his youth, and someone definitely got his tail ripped off, but I think that he probably got the better because he's still alive. He was also missing, or not missing,

part of his eye was scratched, and that's how we were able to recognize him when we got him again because of his large size and the fact that his right eye just kind of looked like a glass eye, and we knew where his tail was missing, and we were just like, this gator loves his chicken because most of the gators do not like going back to the traps. What are the traps like? Do you have to put like a minivan underwater and just load it in? I wish it was that easy. So these traps are really weird, and so the best way I can explain it is the trap has kind of a mouth that's the shape of a triangle, and in the back of the trap I put a piece of raw chicken. Oh side note, Laura sent me a photo with detailed info on what bungee does what, but essentially just note this trap looks like

two unfinished Ikea bookshelf pieces, kind of forming a V with then a long stick in the air, like a tail at one end, and it's all set up in the reeds near the banks or the shore, and it all holds a wire loop that tightens once the bait at the V is chomped, but the chomper doesn't get to scurry off so soon. And then the lasso is tied off to either a tree or a stake, and so they're able to just kind of like hide in the water or go on to land once they get trapped, but it's when you're like doing it, it's very simple surprisingly. It sounds like kind of a bigger scale operation as maybe like a lizard lassoing in the field. Exactly, right? It's literally, yes 100%, it's literally like they just go through the lasso and it tightens up once they get the bait. You know,

there should be some kind of Rube Goldberg where that triggers some kind of a trombone to just be like... I actually was there when Java got trapped the second time. Yeah, it was really funny. We were on the airboat and it was nighttime and we were checking my traps and we noticed that there was an alligator that was right in front of one, and so we stayed to the side and all of a sudden we see one of my alligators that I'm GPS tracking. It was swimming away, she says. And so we're all like, oh look, let's go look at the transmitter and then all of a sudden I hear some splashing and no one else from on the boat heard it and we go over and he just like had gotten trapped literally while we were there. I was so bummed because if we were just like a foot to the left we would have saw it happen

because he's so big but I mean better than nothing. Oh, born Java. I know. He really wanted his chicken. He's like, I've run through so much. And okay, so many questions. Very, very shameless one. I'm going to ask alligator versus crocodile. What do we have in North America? I mean I know one's crocodile's got a skinny mouth, right? Yes. Okay. They definitely have a narrower snout. Okay. What else is different about them? So the main distinctions are crocodiles actually get a lot bigger than alligators. In North America we have the American alligator which is distributed throughout most of the Southeast so from Texas to Oklahoma there's a small population in Oklahoma and then the American crocodile is only in Southeast Florida and so they're not doing too

hot because I think I don't know too much about American crocs but I do know that they are more specific on their climate that they can like reproduce and thrive in whereas alligators are just very much so generalists. Crocodiles do tend to be bigger. American alligators and American crocodiles are pretty similar in size. I think American crocs can just get a little bit bigger than them. Now American crocodiles can get about five feet larger than American gators and crocs in North America can reach nearly 20 feet and weigh 2,000 pounds. So many pounds but saltwater crocs in India and Southwest Asia and the northern coast of Australia those can top 20 feet and weigh in at 3,000 pounds about as heavy as your car. Give or take a couple of

umbrellas and empty travel mugs. So other than the degree of absolute unitness what else distinguishes a croc from a gator? Also the snouts are different so American alligators or have a what we call the U-shaped snout. It's just more robust whereas crocodiles have a more narrow snout which is the V-shaped snout and then alligators honestly look less scary. They have an overbite and it looks cute in my opinion whereas crocodiles their teeth are kind of just all over the place and the main thing with crocodiles is they do have an overbite but their fourth lower tooth on their lower jaw sticks out and that's like another major distinction because alligators just have the overbite they don't have any bottom teeth sticking out whereas the crocs do. So to recap

crocodiles are a little bit bigger they have narrower snouts and a lower jaw snaggle situation whereas alligators are a little smaller they have a broader snooter and a doofy overbite that is very cute. Now how about a vibe check? I do think crocodiles look a little bit more intimidating than alligators and behaviorally crocodiles are less chill than alligators. Yeah you mentioned that alligators are they love to fight they'll throw down. Can you tell me a little bit about what it's like especially if you're out there at night like what is a night like for you you're on an airboat at night looking for alligators and like dark water like what how do you even deal with that that's amazing. Okay we had a little audio hiccup here so

apologies but Laura says that she feels comfy when she's out doing the field work as a team with her very alligator experienced and great advisor Dr. Ben Parrott who disappointingly does not also study subtropical birds and I'm sure that that is a joke Dr. Parrott has never once heard ever in his life happy to be the first. Also Laura says that they get the willies factor kind of depends on your ride so a smaller lower vessel with fewer lights it's kind of a nope boat. So I just did not feel comfortable because the lake can be really sketchy in the dark whereas when we're in the airboat there's like three three to four of us and the airboat has much brighter light so we can see what's going on and I just feel safer with having three other people with me

and so it definitely is a intimidating process I think the first time around but I've gotten really used to it and I basically became nocturnal during the summer really all my trapping was at night yes we definitely did try trapping during the day the first time around and that meant we left traps overnight but we ended up getting alligators that were getting attacked by other males and so we decided to just set traps around from anywhere from two to four p.m. and then let them sit until the sun went down which was usually around nine and if it was nine and we didn't get any alligators we would just sit on the boat and wait a few hours until they would come into the traps we knew we would have a better success rate leaving them overnight but also it was just too unpredictable

to do so because they're just so aggressive so after they saw animals getting jumped by other alligators they stopped leaving traps overnight and instead would just hang out on boats until the party started so midnight 1 a.m. gators coming out for nibbles and then once they're in the trap they would follow up process them get their samples until the wee hours of 5 a.m. or so so it's a rough night in the field but the alternative was leaving these mostly brogators snared all night which is just a one-way ticket to nibble town but all of them had puncture wounds and every time we came near a trap we saw another male like nervously swimming away they knew they were guilty oh my god I was like get out of here it's like a chihuahua that's been digging through the garbage

you're like exactly gosh 100% but yeah I mean honestly the worst thing about trapping at night is the bugs in my oh my gosh okay that was gonna be my follow-up question I want to know best bug repellent and also okay you're on a boat you're on a lake it's summer it's 11 45 p.m. what are you scrolling on your phone are you writing in a journal are you guys just are you gossiping did you learn everyone's secrets what is that kind of camaraderie like when you're on a boat waiting for a huge alligator to nibble on chicken oh my god I love that okay first best bug repellent for me personally is Picardon I absolutely cannot stand the smell of deep and I think is known for destroying clothes as well and Picardon actually like just is meant to be on

clothing okay I look this up and Picardon sounds like a cologne from 2007 but rather it comes in many brands and forms and Laura says that it works wonders she missed it on her clothes and she has a skin-safe type for any exposed flesh but sometimes you just have to accept that bugs will bug you they're good at it they love it and we get a lot of like naps that just come around us so bug repellent won't do anything that it's literally like the moth meme they just love the light oh my gosh I would just want to wear like a veil like a beekeeper veil just like just don't get in my face well I did get one in my ear and had to go to the hospital to get it removed yeah I have six earrings on one of my ears and I have my hair and braid and I kept hearing them

come near and I think all the headlamps were reflecting off in my earrings and eventually I just hear and then all it gets really loud and I was like no you got to be kidding me and this was one of the first days we were putting a GPS tag on an animal so here's my advisor basically doing the surgical process to do that and I'm just like twitching my head because I'm trying to get this bug to fly out and long story short I had the bug in my ear all night how to go process my data with the bug in my ear and I went to bed that night with it in my ear because I was so tired it was five in the morning I just didn't give a crap oh my god and then when you went to like urgent care whatever the next day what did they pull out what was it it was the tiniest little net like it was

so small the physician's assistant who took it out was just laughing because he saw me take a picture of me flipping it off because I was just like I need to show everyone the bug that was in my ear that sent me to the hospital during a pandemic like I didn't want to go to the doctors but yeah so bug repellent can only do so much well you obviously must like what you do a lot to have these kinds of adventures and to put up with it like you mentioned you're from the west coast what part of the west coast are you from I'm from California so Laura was raised in San Diego and her dad is a navy vet and her mom has bravely learned to love reptiles and she seems to have had a lot of good moral support to pursue her love including Dr. Brian Todd who started her

down the path to get her bachelors in wildlife fish and conservation biology from the University of California Davis whose mascot is a horse and not an aquatic reptile what brought you to do your research in South Carolina and to do it on alligators because I also am from California and I do not recall any alligators that were not in zoos here so how did you how did you cozy up to these beasts okay so a lot of people's origin stories usually start with Steve Irwin and I mean he definitely wasn't influenced in becoming a wildlife biologist but my origin story for alligators is a bit more unorthodox so my dad and I would watch this show the show Axemen on the history channel so much banjo music humidity and pistols tucked into the waistbands of short

shorts and there are a lot of quirky characters on the show which I think is why they got a show and so there's this one guy who did a lot of his logging in the bayou of Louisiana so he'd just be down and dirty in the swamp and he was a total character who just had no shirt on like 50 years old had the thickest bayou accent and wore booty shorts and his name was Shelby and he would just like jump on alligators in the swamp grab snakes and bite their head off and like make a scarf out of them and just like had this this guy gave no fucks he was just hilarious what the hell was that I know there's a damn big ass log down there but I also know there's a big ass alligator down there too give me way more give him a dog and so Laura says she's Mexican

American and when she turned 15 her mom asked if she'd like to have a quinceanera which is a celebration of the transition toward young adulthood you know there's maybe a ball gown and a cake perhaps a dj definitely a photo booth all eyes on you it might be some teenager's version of heaven on earth Laura's response was uh I don't know like I like going to the parties but I don't know if I want to have my own and so she was like well you can either have a quinceanera or you can go wherever you want you can choose a place in the US so within reason to go do for turning 15 and I was like I want to go to Louisiana and go to a swamp oh my god that's amazing so yeah so we went to New Orleans we did a swamp tour and saw alligators and I was just like

this is the coolest thing in the world fast forward to years later I get my bachelor's degree from wildlife fish and conservation biology at UC Davis and I realized I really liked working with reptiles I worked in the reptile lab all throughout my time at Davis and it was just an amazing experience because I was originally pre vet but I was just bored working with like house pets that weren't her petafana it's just like I want to work with reptiles and amphibians and just loved doing research and so I worked with the USGS for a field season after I graduated doing snake stuff and as much as I loved doing technician work I realized I still kind of wanted to be part of more of the science and like data analyses and I saw my graduate position advertised on the Texas A&M

wildlife job board and was just like I have to apply like I don't know if I'm qualified for this or not but I just need to apply because alligators amazing oh my gosh what was it like the moment that you found out that you got it I was shocked I was kind of speechless to be honest because everyone I knew was like there's no way you're going to move to the southeast you're such a California and you're live breathe die California like you wouldn't last a day in the southeast and I was like well I really loved Louisiana I mean I went again um a few years after the first time going my mom and I fell in love and so I was just like I don't know I can't stay in California my entire life like I probably will come back after I graduate because I love it here

but um I just don't feel like I will ever forgive myself if I say no to this opportunity out of fear of living somewhere else and so I kind of just said screw it let's do it like my advisor called me and told me like you got the position you can have a week to decide and I was like I don't need to decide I'm gonna take this like this is a dream opportunity that's great oh my gosh who is that person that you think is out of your league or that job that's over your pay grade or that exciting city you want to move to what if you took that risk what would you have to lose and think of all that you could gain I'd just say just do it we're all gonna die anyway I mean no offense okay and so now talking about heavy metal alligators when it comes to um the mercury

ingestion that you're finding is that from eating fish that have eaten fish that have eaten fish or is that completely from a different source no you hit the nail in the head right there definitely so that process right there is biomagnification when it just keeps moving up the trophic level and since alligators are apex predators they're at the top and I mean at least when they're full grown they're at the top but um and that basically makes them more susceptible and since they're so long lived like they can live up to 70 years I think the oldest one in captivity was 83 years old so a chap by the name of Saturn the long reigning world's oldest alligator lived in a Moscow zoo for a long time but just passed away about five months ago and he was known for being

an alligator that Hitler enjoyed visiting in the Berlin Zoo until the Berlin Zoo was bombed and Saturn was found wandering among the wreckage of the warthorne city looking for food but now Muya is the oldest alligator and he lives in Serbia he also survived World War II bombings which is a great reminder that alligators are very hardy and were not that far away historically from world wars started by homicidal white supremacists anyway alligators eat a lot of rabbits and fish and they just snack over a lifetime right it just means that they're going to bioaccumulate contaminants over time so bioaccumulation basically is that they're ingesting contaminants at a higher rate than they're screening them so they just kind of stay in their system

and then with mercury specifically methylmercury it's a super soluble contaminant which means it will just like be very easily ingested and kind of stay in the muscles of whatever's consuming it how does that mercury effect or methylmercury affect reptiles versus mammals say? reptiles are really resilient i do know mammals are more at risk with that type of exposure reptiles are just kind of crazy they literally there's a reason why alligators haven't really needed to evolve in the last like 80 million years they're just very resilient but the problem with that though is that people don't want to invest in research towards them when it seems like nothing was wrong with them you know and that respect there's not a lot of literature out on the different

effects that some of these metals have on these animals because i mean there's endocrine disruptors that are definitely part of ecotoxicology and that's like pesticides such as DDT oh and pharmaceuticals too from our little amber bottles to our mouths to our pee to the water to alligators and just like a game of telephone some shit's gonna get wacky i'm sure you've heard of birth control getting into the water and causing sex reversal in animals and just other compounds like plastic and PCBs that are just not good for the development of some of these animals but in respect to metals there's still a lot to be done because there's not really any observable effects in a lot of these animals walking through a little bit of what's in the guts of an alligator

how different is it from humans do they have like livers and spleens and kidneys in the same numbers that we do yes we did actually dissect a pretty um big size alligator once and it was kind of shocking how much their um internals looked like ours one of Laura's colleagues the amazing Kristen Semitas actually looks at what alligators eat and spoiler alert her job is not boring she's found a crazy amount of things their stomachs and how to pump like 300 alligator stomachs in the summer just like i could not imagine doing that she's a champion oh i would love to uh send her a text or something ask her what the weirdest thing is that she's found i'll put it aside because i'm sure you'd be like oh my god it's like cell phones or you know god only

knows someone's car keys she's definitely have found some weird things i can totally ask her to find out yes i made laura text christine while we were recording and like any good alligator ecotoxicologist she was down to dish she said she's found a mango some weird intestines that she couldn't quite identify feral cats are pretty common and christine added that she once pumped a freshly ingested raccoon and she felt bad for having taken the big lugs recent lunch like come on man i was digesting that she also finds a surprising amount of bugs leading her to believe that if it moves a gator will bite it and yes this includes dogs and humans and deer and just things and people that trust me you do not want to google or visualize or experience

with too many senses when you dissect an alligator what does that smell like oh god it smelled awful i remember i had a mask with me and i was just like i'm gonna keep this on because i can't do this right oh my gosh swamp fish amazing it's just rancid oh i bet just like rancid like swampy fish stuff yes exactly literally rancid just like i don't know like a really right trash can't right that's the best word i can use when you're um when you're checking on them after you've trapped them how are you measuring the levels of heavy metals and in their tissue are you having

to do tissue biopsies or how does that work yes so a little background because i realize i've kind of gone so many tangents i haven't gone over what my research is in whole so by looking at the human consumption risk associated with eating alligators i have to think of like what are the main parts of alligators that are consumed and tail muscle is the most commonly consumed part and i take tail punch biopsies using a circular 10 millimeter biopsy punch and i give them a local anesthetic lidocaine in the area where i'm going to acquire the punch so that it's completely painless for them and i just take a really tiny sample um and i take blood every time we get an animal we the first thing we do after restraining them is retrieving blood and so i'm going to use both blood and tail

muscle to see if blood can potentially just be an indicator of mercury levels in the tail so that tail muscle doesn't necessarily need to be acquired for future studies and just also to get an idea of how much mercury is in the tail itself and if humans are at risk of consuming it i can't imagine how you can restrain a tail i believe you've used the term yeet on july 25th 2020 laura tweets the yeet herd around the world and if you don't know what yeeted means let's let her expound my friend that was his way of describing it you got yeeted by an alligator so first time i went out in the field there's only three people and that was because we didn't think we're gonna get too large of animals like maybe eight feet max second time i went out there

was only three of us and that's when we first got java we got two eleven footers and a ten footer i had told my advisor when we were at the first alligator that was 11 feet i was like i don't think we should just have three people i think we need a fourth and he was like we can't expect people to give up their time to come and help us and then we got java and he was like you're right we need a fourth we'll make it happen because java was dragging him into the water oh my god he was trying to restrain him so it was just a mess and with four people it goes so smoothly because i have me you know dictating the measurements that i get from these animals and i have two people restraining it and then my advisor who's usually taking blood or helping me with getting measurements

and stuff because him and i kind of just have gotten to a point which we can read each other's minds to get all the data we need and we just need two people she said usually the tail isn't problematic usually i just had a really bad luck the one day that i was out and i was trying to reach for my data sheet and my advisor kept telling me watch for the tail watch for the tail and i was like i'm fine like i just need to grab this this and that he's like the tail was swaying quite a bit and he's just like laura you need to really watch for the tail um and i just kind of like dismissed it and all of a sudden i feel boom on my back and i just fly forward and freeze for a second because i presume that the winds knocked out of me and once i realize i'm okay we just look

at each other and he goes i told you to watch for the tail are you okay and i'm like yes i'm fine but what just happened wow did it leave a mark no thankfully it didn't no bruises or anything i had my roommate check the next morning this was at like five in the morning too we had a really late night that night so i think i was just so mentally numb that i was like okay time to keep going with oh what a trooper what a badass oh that's amazing the bug in the ear was worse the bug in the ear was worse oh my god that is shocking that a nat a tiny nat is oh my god that's the best realization ever oh my god so yes yeeted aka thwacked now in her tweet she posted a screenshot of a text from a friend who upon hearing this tale of hers declared that she had been millirocked

by a gator and fear not i have researched this term for us the millirock is a dance that looks like you're determined to swat away bees but cooler it looks like you are yeeting researchers and you are a giant crocodilian now despite this laura says that she would get hit by the tail of an 11 foot alligator every night if it meant not getting another tiny bug in her ear which honestly sounds like some kind of weird fable or a fairy tale about how to tell a regular person from an enchanted swamp princess with magical reptilian gifts now what about let's say that you that you're finding high mercury levels in these alligators is there a way to like chelate that is there a way to help the alligators or what would be the next step so my work is at the savannah

riverside which is the department of energy owned property and it used to be a former nuclear weapons plant pardon and so in order to produce radioactive material you need to have bodies of water nearby these reactors so that all the heat effluent basically waste discharge can go into that water and let it settle okay quick but complicated aside laura explains that the contaminants in these waters can come from the former nuclear weapons facility and also the stores of old coal ash and what's called boiler slag that can settle into the surrounding bodies of water so short of draining the lakes she says it's a hard thing to clean up now in the area where she does her trapping the nuclear reactor was only in service for four years but the alligators are mobile as

hell they can swim up to 20 miles an hour that's three times faster than olympian michael felps so she uses gps monitoring to see if they get closer to the nuclear facilities or if they leave and are in hunting territory and she said she does see people fishing on the river but she isn't sure if the potential danger phases them and according to some studies i looked into subsistence fishing in that area is more common for people of lower financial means and there was a paper published this year titled legacy contaminants in aquatic biota in a stream associated with nuclear weapons material production on the savannah riverside and it found that fish collected from sites adjacent to certain facilities had significantly higher radiocesium concentrations

compared to fish from other sites and although some government-run websites attest that the water is being treated and that mercury in the treated water has been reduced by more than 95 percent the south carolina department of health and environmental control does state their intentions for the quote timely treatment of the 37 million gallons of liquid high level waste and closure of the storage tanks some of which have leak sites end quote so not only does laura wrestle alligators at 3 am for her job but she does it in the name of cleaning up ecological toxins and keeping gators and people safer amazing do you have to take any precautions as someone who works at those sites for yourself so i always have to call out we have kind of like a security

service at site like in order to access site you have to be badged and go through like eight hour training so it's very strict which i think is really good considering the wildlife that is there and i always have to call out to that security and let them know my grid where i'm going how long i'm going to be out there for and how many people i'm going to have with me and i also have to bring extra radio out and they do tell me there are heavy amounts of contaminations in the water be careful but that's a bad hit otherwise like i'm going in this water i have to get wet to set the traps and i mean i think as long as i'm not having too long term of exposure i will be okay i think if it was like me going out every single day for three years then i'd be a little bit more concerned but since

it's just twice a week during the summer and try to get as many animals as we can and you're not you're not filling up like your now gene bottle in the in the river or the lake i imagine absolutely not we bring our own water with us every time not uh not fishing in there yourself right no i'd be way too scared yeah who have fish with three eyes that's for sure yeah you're like i'm good um i have so many questions from listeners can i breeze through some yes of course this is the first alligator episode we've ever done obviously and people are pumped but before of course you know that we donate to a cause chosen by theologist and laura was so passionate about it going to the wildlife conservation society which is a non-profit

private organization established in 1895 that saves wildlife and wild places by understanding critical issues and crafting science-based solutions and conservation actions that benefit nature and humanity and in particular these funds will go directly to the critically endangered siamese crocodile conservation project in laos okay and that donation was made possible by the following sponsors who let us throw money at reptiles okay your crocodilian inquiries and alligator answers oh people are excited oh my gosh okay um this is a weird question so i'm going to ask it first um angela clark wants to know okay native floridian here the anaconda eating gator that exploded please discuss tegan andrews agrees have you ever heard of an anaconda eating gator

that exploded i think wait i've seen a picture of a uh bermus python eating an alligator and it's like body got ripped up from doing it because snakes will do that they'll eat things that are way too big for them and get their entire like intestines just kind of ripped out but anaconda eating alligator i don't know i mean that does sound like something that would happen in florida yes it does they really do however i'm wondering if she means a bermus python that got eaten by an alligator or if she meant what i just said about the bermus python that ate the alligator and exploded it's possible and i feel like at least one of them was smoking a cigarette at this time maybe the alligator was like i did just picture in florida there's an alligator smoking a cigarette

and a bermus python wearing jorts tries to eat it i don't know what's going on down there um but i love it i apologize i do not have a scientific answer to that question that was mostly alligator gossip you're dying to know more about this and i know because you are me so i googled for us in october 5th 2005 a day that will live in her pathology it was a 13 foot invasive python which ate a six foot alligator and in case you didn't get to smell photos of this allow me to just paint a pic so imagine trying to shove a wine bottle into a sock but the sock ripped and died and then was bobbing and rotting on the surface of a swamp and it was giant also if you ever build a time machine maybe don't let anyone release their pet pythons in florida because scientists estimate that there

are now up to 300 000 of these giant loose hungry pythons and they are eating way too many raccoons and opossums and bobcats and rabbits and foxes all kinds of mammals oh and i guess as long as you're got the time machine fired up to swoop by the zoo and feed hitler to Saturn burp jeffrey Bradshaw and hope did ask if the florida gator versus Burmese python thing is still going on and jeffrey wants to know are they eating any of the invasive pythons and if not can we train them to i wish we could train them too that would be awesome it'd be great but basically Burmese pythons are really thriving in the area where american crocodiles are and the thing with these pythons is they are egg eaters and they'll go and just like destroy a nest and they will also

go and eat juvenile alligators and crocodiles and i mean alligators they take a while to grow they need to have a good surplus of food in order to get big they have maternal care till they're five years old which means they stay near where their nest site is until they're probably about um three to four feet and they still will do their little laser beam call to their mom even if they're like too big to be doing so if they're under a lot of distress so i do think Burmese pythons are a big problem in eradicating the american crocodile population alligators are pretty abundant throughout florida and the southeast in general so i can't see Burmese pythons necessarily doing too much damage to them but it is still an issue for sure. Well actually a lot of people had social

and behavioral questions and Kendra St. Clair wants to know what are the social lives of gators like and uh Ciara Craig Peixiao asked do alligators have friends do they feel love and uh Carrie Kimo wants to know has an alligator ever looked for some love and snuggles from a handler do they have a soft side and a few people want to know if they're just grumpy because it's true they have a lot of teeth but no toothbrush which is probably from a song or from a joke please see the 1998 cinematic opus the water boy in which Adam Sandler asked that of a biology professor also may i suggest that patrons Alexa Forsman Kimberly Cooley and Xavier Rivera consider getting three-way best friend necklaces for all asking the same question also real quick crocodilians can make all kinds

of sounds they do kind of lusty pillow talk some squeaky pleas for mom and crocodile tears are not a myth so let's bust that flim flam that they're flim flam so i looked it up an alligator scientist dr ken flat videotaped caiman eating gator chow and found that five of the seven animals teared up as they tore into their food some of their eyes were frothing and bubbling some real meryl streep action happening over here nobody really knows why but i like to think that they're having a ratatouille moment each time just thinking about life and love and regret and beauty and rats temperament wise like what is their social structure like so the females tend to keep to themselves i'm only putting transmitters on males because they're

more mobile than females the females will just kind of do their own thing usually if it's breeding season they'll stay near a nest or they'll just overall be more discreet i definitely have had a male bias from what i trap too and i do think it's because males are just out and about like my like my transmitter animals are always on the go so in winter months alligators usually brumate which is a less sleepy version of hibernation but even on warmer winter days they may kind of stumble out of their dens and burrows and just soak up a couple of rays it's november and laura says her gators are still cruising around like nobody's business except that it's very much her business like it's her job but they're also grumpy because they don't like being around each other

and i get very nervous when i see that there's a movement overlap with my males because i don't want them crossing paths given how territorial they can be and like i said earlier java just didn't get beat up like that for no reason they will fight for mate they'll fight for territory they just do not like each other i actually just hate you but females i think are less aggressive and like i said they just they keep to themselves and some alligators will hang out together we've gotten plenty of big eye shines out at night with a few just almost looking like an adult pod because that's if the babies are called a pod otherwise they tend to keep to themselves the babies though will for sure hang out near each other and it's really cute just seeing them like

kind of all dispersed when they don't want to be captured but they'll stay in the same territory whereas adults will not do that do they still do they have maternal care as well like crocodiles yes they do so they will make the little laser beam noises we actually did some hatchling releases for a phd student who's doing work with hatchlings in my lab we found out that a female adopted some of the hatchlings that she released and when we drove up to add to the releases all of a sudden we hear a giant splash and we just see her like coming near us not close enough to be scared but she kind of stayed about like 10 feet away so she could keep an eye on us to make sure that we weren't grabbing any of the babies that were already at that pod it was really cute can they run fast

i mean if an alligator if a territorial mother alligator were 10 feet away from me i would just i would call a priest i would like write my will i'd be like it's over for me is how far can they get 10 feet away from you and until you're in their mouth i've always seen them swim i've seen one walk in person and they walk so awkwardly but if i was in the water yeah that that's just it you can just say goodbye to life remember these gators can gun it up to 20 miles an hour in the water but just 11 miles an hour on land which is pretty slow if you're trying to outrun them in a car say but 11 miles per hour is fast hell on foot people unless you smoke a mountain dew there is no way you can pull a sustained

five-minute mile to outrun an alligator which is hungry to chomp on your crotch until you die and you have less of a chance in the water which might also be murky and maybe contaminated so how do these chunks hull ass when they don't even have asses well i found a 2019 study titled divergent evolution of terrestrial locomotor abilities in extant crocodilia which said that quote extant crocodilia alligators crocs are exceptional because they employ almost the full range of quadrupedal footfall patterns gates used by mammals including asymmetrical gates such as galloping and bounding in a word they have moves but yes back to the way they slice through the bio because they swim so fast and i mean we've had a try going after one when we were in a boat just

to snare it and it was zooming away it could have gone a lot quicker to you know make sure that it got away from us but it was just kind of like gliding along and it was still kind of out running us they're incredible swimmers will be in the boat coming near one and they'll almost do like a dolphin not a dolphin jump but they'll kind of like flop over and death roll themselves back into the water because they get so scared of being around humans oh okay by the by researchers have studied the death roll behavior and i just spent way too long reading a 2007 journal of experimental biology article titled death roll of the alligator mechanics of twist feeding in water and it involved a slow motion video of a few dozen baby alligators who had wooden coffee stirr

sticks and i'm going to wage your money that they were stolen from starbucks but they were taped to their baby gator tails to figure out that when they roll the arms i guess they have arms and legs tuck in like a figure skater spinning like a top and then their tails angle out like an l also the paper said spinning is a mechanism that can tear apart large prey by subjecting the tissue to torsional stresses animals and their tissues it continues are weak in torsion which if you just pictured an animal or yourself being shredded in a bog right now you're not alone if you are alone just please hug yourself and actually tell me a little bit about their diet if you don't mind kylie caramba elena reynolds both wanted to know about diet yeah noah sullivan wanted to know

are they picky eaters bailey wanted to ask has evolution affected what they eat and a ton of people angie b samatha heinecky monica and elma call all want to know first time question asked great angie b asked i went on a swamp boat tour and they fed them marshmallows seems like a bad idea can they eat marshmallows since mantha wants to know if they're addicted to marshmallows are they bad for them like what's up this marshmallow haven't they have and what do they usually eat so i've been on two swamp tours i do not know why they give them marshmallows because i'm getting hot dogs and that's like okay fine but the marshmallow as i've like gotten in the crocodilian world i'm just like man that's kind of insulting that's an empty calorie

that like they're foreign tested not to deal with oh i asked the internet who has apparently asked people giving swamp boat tours and it's because marshmallows look like eggs like floating eggs and they love eggs so imagine someone tossing you your favorite hearty healthy sandwich and then you took a bite and it was mostly air corn syrup and boiled pig tendon oh such a cruel bamboozle but in respect to their diet so alligators are total generalists and i think this is why they've done so well through evolution and just their distribution in the southeast is so wide because of the fact that they're just really open to eating whatever when their first hatch they have a yolk reserve that basically lets them be set for about a year they technically won't

need to eat anything because once they hatch which is around late summer it only is a few months until they need to go in through a brumation period which means like they're just not mobile during the winter and so they kind of rely on that egg yolk reserve to hold them over until spring and then they'll go for insects and so when a reptile is really young they usually need a lot of protein so juveniles will still be somewhat opportunistic in respect to getting insects amphibians small fish like mosquito fish and other inverts like shrimp maybe tiny crawdads the adults however will just go for what they can get we've seen a six foot adult with a three foot carp in its mouth it looked like a dog with a giant bone it was so cool and so they definitely

love their fish i'm sure plenty of people have seen crazy pictures of a crocodile jumping out of the water to eat a bird or something alligators will do the same thing there's plenty of birds who try to predate on their nest so they get their revenge when they're older they'll go after mammals like deer there's a lot of invasive hogs in the southeast so they'll go after those two snakes turtles or victims and of course alligators love to eat other alligators unfortunately you oh my gosh okay that's awful Ella Thompson wants to know do alligators use spare offspring as snacks does that happen how often do they eat each other it's honestly it seems like it's more frequently than like one would like to know and that's mainly from what i've heard from my colleague

who's doing all this stomach pumping she's found plenty of evidence of other alligators laura says that sometimes alligators get reared in the lab and cared for and coddled and fostered and are released into the wild and they swim away like dandelion wishes in the water and then sometimes an adult alligator will just breeze through and eat the babies like pac-man i wasn't there but hearing it i was just like what is happening like i can't believe they're that i'm so cruel it's just a cruel world out there i mean it's like popcorn they're just kind of there and they swim so slow they can't stand or water that long when they're hatchling so for a big guy it's just like a free-for-all if he finds the pod and so that's why like they need mothers nearby or else they're screwed

and the mom can only get to them so quickly oh my god that's so heartbreaking you're like we just raised that i know it's crazy because realistically by being um hatched in captivity we increased their survival by a lot it's just kind of disappointing when they're in the wild and it's like well that's so sad um i know it's important sweet little babies i know um a bunch of people anakin geniac ewen moonrow and jack brownfield all wanted to know about their jaw strength ewen asked why are they so rubbish at opening their mouths when they are arguably the greatest of all time at biting and when you're restraining them when you're getting whipped around my tails is there just duct tape around the jaws yes so when we get an alligator we pull it up onto land

or onto the boat with its snare and its snare is usually tied off to a rope and the rope is tied off to the tree or to the boat because we can't let the alligator go with that around its neck so to help calm the animals the first thing they do either on the boat or on land is to throw a towel over its head because once the eyes are covered they kind of freeze and some other people side note might subdue an alligator by rubbing their bellies and this is called tonic immobility it's a little dicey don't mistake their chill for a spa day reaction it's the animal's response to a threat but laura and her researchers simply subdue the critter with the towel and they work fast they just don't know what to do even if their mouth is like open while the towel's over

their eyes they can't see anything they don't know what to do so we just go behind them and then pet all our force on the top of their jaw and then grab underneath it and restrain it and someone will always be ready if not two people will always be ready but i always have like three rolls of tape duct tape and electrical tape on me just for an in case of emergency situation and so we get that mouth taped and then the towel usually stays on because it just relaxes the animal i can't even imagine the whole restraining process is just like just this mental communication we just kind of know what needs to be done and just kind of go with the flow of getting the animal reading its body language but usually restraining them is a lot easier to process

now especially that we have four people but if you want to get an alligator to open their mouth which i don't recommend to people doing you just got to boot the snoo it's literally when we want to get cool pictures of some of our bigger animals we have a very long bamboo stick and we just tap the nose a little bit and eventually they open the mouth it works with the babies too we just give them a tap with their finger i wonder what evolutionarily how that evolved like if something boops your snoot we better open up i really think it's because they're opportunistic eaters that as long as they felt something touched their nose they're like okay we'll eat you whoa oh my god good enough you might be a marshmallow but good enough

no wonder why they've been around for 80 million years um so many people need this flim flam debunked are they dinosaurs are they lizards are they neither so alligators are a little newer less than 40 million years old but their crocodilian history goes back 95 million years so they were around when dinos were stomping about but many patrons such as Rachel Selby, Justin McCormick, Kelsey Naffa, Carly Cross, JV Hampton-Vonsent, Sid Gopkejard, Janelle Baker, Jen Squirrel, Alvarez, first-time question asker Rachel, Dana, DeGernet, Marty Goodwin, and Samantha Steeleman all had similar questions and in Samantha's words are they our dinosaur overlords meant to rule alongside the chickens they're not lizards and there's a whole evolutionary explanation out there for why

they're not lizards and it's unfortunately because they're closer related to birds um than I would like to think but they're still reptiles and reptiles rule yes but not dinos not lizards no they're their own like just special things so the neat thing about crocodilians are they're the only like reptile to have a four-chambered heart and I mean it makes sense because they're so big but birds also have four-chambered hearts which is why they're I think classified as archosaurs they definitely have some cool adaptations to them that other reptiles don't really have going on for them is this a good time to talk about gator dongs okay well too bad so their dicks live just inside the cloaca and they don't get inflatable erections they have stiff kind of translucent

white collagen fortified perma boners just like kind of having a cocked and loaded gun in a pocket or tucked in the waist of some gene shorts these dangators y'all are ready for anything now what about eggs in the coloniology episode about turtles aka sea turtles we learned that temperature can affect the sex of the babies which would be kind of like if your confetti explosion display at your child's genital reveal party sparked a wildfire and your son suddenly turned into a daughter ew jk that's all gross and as we heard in the neuroendocrinology episode endocrine chemicals can shape how we present how we identify and as always my trans and non-binary humans nothing in nature is a hundred percent binary and animals including us humble humans are gorgeously individual

that being said what chemically does the rising temperature of earth due to these ancient eggs asked alexa forzman forest dots biological anthropologist dr durkovich kary kimo and juchel venessa fray loren erinholz megan and ellie thompson as well as first time question asker kassandra carlos who had an inquiry about adoption among the alligator community so many patrons on patreon wanted to know about temperature and clutch and whether or not that switches the sex of the baby alligators does it yes so they are temperature sex dependent they basically incubate as females at extreme temperatures which it's typically taught that crocodilians require high temperatures to be females low temperatures to be males but uh and our lab we

actually found that it's more of the extreme so around like 33 degrees celsius they'll be incubated as females and over 34 degrees celsius they'll be incubated as females and then around 32.8 degrees celsius we'll get males so if you are an american i see you out there staring out the window wondering how cold that is and i also looked it up and over 93 ish degrees fahrenheit you've got more lady gators 91 ish degrees more gator dudes and so that's one of the neat things about ecotoxicology is we're kind of looking at how certain substances in the environment could potentially alter this especially with endocrine disrupting chemicals they have definitely been found to cause sex reversal regardless of incubation temperature oh so then what is going to happen population-wise

with that it could depending on where the animals cause a sex bias and that could cause a population to decline right now i would think the bigger concern would be implications for climate change and small plug for my lab parrot lab at university of georgia um samantha balk in my lab she's doing a lot of really cool research with temperature sex determination and potential impacts of climate change and endocrine disruptors on hatchling alligators so fascinating um what about in media james hails wants to know how often do you notice alligators in movies that are presented as crocodiles i.e. temple of doom and also people asking how you feel about the show swamp people we're gonna do the alligator shuffle yeah yeah yeah i've never seen the show swamp people to be

honest um so i'm sorry if i can't give an answer oh that's okay on that i'm basically my own swamp person that's enough for me but when alligators are incorrectly portrayed it definitely is triggering now that i'm like aware of it i haven't really seen uh media where an alligator is being used in place of a crocodile but also i kind of get it because alligators are a lot gentler than crocodile so i don't really blame them for doing that however i have seen the movie crawl recently i and it's the most inaccurate portrayal of alligators i could have ever seen in my life it was just atrocious and i just had to keep watching it because it was that oh no it's like shark nato but with florida alligators oh so did they even attempt to get it right or did someone

just like land on the wrong wikipedia page someone just decided that alligator equals scary and that hurricane equals alligators will hunt the humans and that's literally the entire premise of the movies alligators going out of their way to hunt humans and like i said if something boops they're snoot they're gonna eat it these humans are just out of the way these animals are not gonna be like i'm gonna go sniff out and hunt a human that's 100 feet away from me because that's just not how it works however hurricanes have seemed to be affecting alligator movement patterns so there's that to be aware of are they going more inland yes i've seen quite a few articles recently that've been showing all these alligators that have just been in more urban areas in florida

from recent hurricanes and this is like kind of all new literature that's coming out about this so just their movement behavior changing as a result of all these natural disasters so it's kind of scary because i can't imagine people handling it the best when they could potentially just like kill the animal feeling threatened when the animal is just trying to find its way home yeah does that happen does a lot of kind of vigilante i saw an alligator ergo i killed an alligator does that happen and is it legal i don't know if it's legal um i know it's not in south carolina and it's not in georgia most people have to file a complaint and get animal to control to come and then they'll euthanize the animal which in my opinion is a total

waste of a life like that animal probably took 40 to 50 years to get to that stage of life and someone younger than it is you know just shooting it because it's a nuisance and i'm saying that in quotes um there should be more effort placed into relocating the animal especially regardless they're gonna have a big group of people restraining an animal okay side note la may have a lot of famous couples but perhaps none is more recently beloved than tina and reggie so tina was a saucy single career alligator who lived in the pasadena humane society for 18 years but recently outgrew her dicks and so she was moved to the la zoo and she was set up with her new companion reggie reggie was a pet abandoned in a local lake by an off-duty la pd officer who must have lost his

damn mind i don't know what he was thinking anyway reggie went on to eat ducks and stuff in evade authorities including steve urwin himself for several years costing the city nearly 200 000 dollars on the pursuit and one fateful day he was basking in 2007 and they captured him and sent him to the la zoo and he busted out immediately he was found chilling on a loading dock probably trying to buy weed from a zookeeper but now tina and reggie both abandoned pets in their 20s they're cohabitating they get along swimmingly although they are in a state of mutual friend zone there's no humping but if they have babies or reggie eats someone tmz better cover it i am invested ever been bitten um yes i have by a one-day hatched alligator baby i got it didn't even have its

teeth didn't even drop yet oh you've got nom done it was so cute i could not let it not bite me she was so feisty we found that our hatchling babies were a lot feisty as females and i was kind of like i respect it the males were so chill never opened their mouths at us and the females just need to be stared at and they would just start doing that oh little lizard pictures i love it now that they're yes exactly they're basically lizards at that size um okay what do you have what do you possess do you have an alligator keychain do you have a alligator t-shirts do you have an alligator nightlight like what types of alligator paraphernalia have you been given or have you purchased it's funny that you say that because i'm literally wearing a gator shirt right now that

says murder log so oh my god yes i have the most intense collection of gator stuff i just love anything herpetaphona and ever since starting alligator research that's all i want and so my sister for my birthday gave me a bracelet that's um gold with a little alligator on it and then tiny gator earrings and they're very like subtle discreet and i absolutely adore it and i have a mask from i don't know if you've seen them on twitter gators daily uh okay he's this like really big gator account and he puts the best gator memes out and uh i've purchased a beanie with an alligator on it recently because i love beanies so yeah it's a bit it's a bit much i'm like that crazy cat lady but with gator stuff oh god i love it that makes me so happy oh actually okay one more

patreon question because i would never forget myself if i didn't ask this um several people a shocking number of people elanda cole natalie bates zoey jane evan and teagan andrew all want to know what is up with metha gators or meth gators drugged up gators from people flushing their drugs down the sewer is that part of ecotoxicology i mean yeah unfortunately wow i i feel like when the whole bath salts thing in florida was going on i heard a lot about this but thankfully i haven't heard too much the everglades just has like a weird amount of contaminants honestly alligator ecotoxicology kind of was like birth because of the contamination going on in florida i haven't heard of meth gators but from a scientific perspective i would think that alligators that ingest these drugs would just

be really delayed and slowed down but i don't think it would kill them because they're just rocks it's true in tennessee public outreach was launched begging people not to flush their illegal amphetamines because no one needs meth gators on their 2020 pingo carts and laura says it would take a large amount of that toxic substance to actually kill this animal when it's full grown and also the toilet meth is very diluted by the time it reaches a water source but i do need you to know however that there is a python in new south wales australia who was addicted to meth because it lived with shall we say a drug salesman who smoked it and it seeped through the python skin and the python was described as very aggressive but they literally sent it to a herpetology rescue

located in a prison to be rehabbed and it's fine now and i love it and i'm proud of it it's really unfortunate how this affects reproduction and just the embryonic stage versus adulthood these animals are pretty sustainable as adults i guess maybe don't eat alligator if you've got to pass a drug test just in case yeah you never know never know okay in all of this you have had bugs in your head you've been yeeted by a tail what is the thing that sucks the most about being an alligator ecotoxicologist i'm gonna guess it's not those things maybe no not at all i think for me personally i have to spend my blood samples and like put all my data collection away and it's like respective places after i get back in the field and this is around like four five

a.m. in the morning and my brain is just like doing a blood smear is harder than most people would think and i mean i've gotten good at it because i've had to do it a bunch of times but having to like have this part of my brain turned on for the sake of just getting my samples processed i think is one of the harder parts and my advisor ben parrot he's amazing he'll always check up on me and make sure the next morning he's like are you okay did you get home safe or before i go to process my data he always asks like are you okay are you too tired or something and i'm like i'm fine like i can go do it um because it's just like it adds an extra hour to the night and so depending on what time it is when we're done with the field it's it tends to be a process because i either have

to drive a boat back to our field site i'm clipping the boat from the truck in itself as a process getting my data or my blood samples spinning and then sometimes i'll just take a shower on site thankfully we have showers while it's spinning so i can like be able to just go home and go to bed because there's no way i can go to bed like just all grimy like that so yeah i can't imagine a worse way of getting into bed if you've been literally wrestling alligators dealing with raw chicken in an area that might be contaminated with nuclear waste like there's nothing there is no way of getting into bed grosser than that i hate cooking raw chicken and i've always hated cooking it and i hate cooking it even more when it's alligator bait i used to wear gloves when

handling it now i'm just like i don't care at all to me too i always just feel like it's a ticking time bomb of all kinds of stuff um and now one yes this is gotta be so hard but your favorite thing about alligators what do you love so so much about them i love their overbites that has to be my favorite thing is their overbite i think it's so cute just i love seeing their i call them their teeth even f i'm always even if it's a big one and we're straining it i'm just like look at you cute little teeth oh mine have very nice teeth i know like in the everglades and in a swamp called okie-finokie swamp in georgia my colleagues have told me that their teeth are black and that they're pretty gross looking animals whereas i think mine are just really cute and a lot of my animals that

i've trapped on the savannah riverside are really just like fat and not like overweight that but they're just they've been eating good and so i just love their morphology just seeing like how well fed they are and their cute little healthy teeth and everything they love um their jowls just kind of ooze when we have them restrained and sometimes just kind of like pinch them a little bit just for animals being patronized by me i'm just like you're so cute this has been amazing i absolutely love alligators more than i ever have before thank you so much for letting me ask you so many shameless questions thank you for having me these are like my favorite questions to be asked so ask badass curious people ancient scaly questions because they light up like river fish also laura asked

that i include some shout outs to her amazing advisors doctors ben parrot and tracy tuberville for their guidance dr thomas rainwater for his expertise and help in all aspects of this project thanks for the awesome help she's gotten from her lab especially from samantha bach junsu bay and stomach bumper christin zemaitis so thank you and hello to the lab and if you are listening to this and you're like boy howdy i want that life i just saw that dr ben parrott's lab has a job opening for a postdoc and i'm going to link that in the show notes what if what if take a chance you can follow laura kajima on twitter at laura kajima or instagram at laura dot kajima and there are links to that in the show notes as well as links to everything we talked about that's all up at

alleyword.com slash ology slash alligator toxicology there's a link to that in the show notes too you don't have to type it all in uh we are at ologies on twitter and instagram so you can follow us and see photos of java the traps the teeny tiny gator the nomter finger and more i am at alley ward with one l on instagram and twitter and cups say hi uh those are linked in the show notes too and hi to the folks on the ologies podcast reddit community i understand there's also a discord somewhere as well i will google how that works uh thank you to erin talbert for admitting the facebook group there is merch available at ologiesmerch.com and thank you shana feltas and bunny dutch of the comedy podcast do you are that for managing that check out you are that they're so funny thank

you so much to all the patrons at patreon.com slash ologies you can join for a dollar a month and you could submit questions to the ologists and you could find out what topics are coming up next emily white and the volunteer transcribers put these sounds to print and those transcripts are available for free for everyone at the link in the show notes in case you know of anyone who is deaf or hard of hearing and a science lover uh thank you to kayla patent for bleeping episodes to make them kid safe also those are available on the website jared sleeper is the assistant editor and this week i would like to acknowledge his beautiful grandma k who is no longer with us but will never leave our hearts um faster than a speeding gator stephen ray morris is the lead

editor and sews all these pieces together each week and he also hosts a cat themed show called the per cast and a dino themed pod called sea Jurassic right nick thorburn wrote and performed the theme music and he's in a band called islands and if you stick around until the end of the credits you get a nugget of truth you get a secret from the boggy depths of my swampy heart and this week it's that for some reason these asides took so long to uh record just because i kept messing up also i remember once when i was in seventh grade and my sister was eating frosted flakes she like came into the room we were watching mtv or something and she was like hey check this out try it with half and half instead of milk and i was like what and when i did it and

it was the most indulgent delectable thing i had ever had and sometimes if i'm like at a hotel breakfast bar and they have frosted flakes i'll use the half and half creamers on it luxury okay you're great until next week bye bye