The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 429: Wrastling Gators

Episode Date: April 10, 2023

Steve Rinella talks with Chris Murray, Janis Putelis, Brody Henderson, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider. Topics include: Mark Kenyon's Working for Wildlife tour; pre-order Catch a Crayfish, Count the Stars; the 62-pound beaver with a mushroomed .22 in the back of the head; an update from Home Range's Trap-a-Cat project; the first captured, collared, released wolverine in Utah; the final word on refried beans; Kansas' ban on trail cams; when you steal a gator egg, hatch it, and then raise that gator for 20 years; the definition of estivate; inspired by Steve Irwin; stinky gator stomachs; smelling underwater; temperature-based sex selection; how gators are good moms; the nest chirping noise; conservation and egg return; long life spans; how to properly capture a gator; the robust innate immune system; sensitivity to ecotoxins; gator blood; holding breath under water for seven hours; and more.  Connect with Steve and MeatEater Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop MeatEater MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Presented by First Light, creating proven, versatile hunting apparel from merino base layers to technical outerwear for every hunt.

First Light. Go farther, stay longer. Alright everybody, in the animals of sexy animal podcast of which we've done many this one takes the cake. We're going to be exploring the mysterious family of, what is it, family?

Yeah, order. The order of crocodilians crocodilia yeah meaning we're going to focus on the american alligator and the american crocodile sure with chris murray of southeastern louisiana university also does a lot of like uh you also do a lot of little tv stuff i did some stuff for animal planet a while back yanni saw you gator wrestling oh yeah it happens part of the job dude i got some gator questions. Yep, it happens. Part of the job. Dude, I got some gator questions

for you, man. Let's do it. I'm going to stump you with some basics. Good. Studies. Check this out. His expertise.

Now, you got so many things stacked in here that is it really fair to say it's expertise? Depends on what you're looking at. Well, I Depends on what you're looking at. Well, I'm telling you what I'm looking at.

Comparative morphology. Yep. Check. Physiological ecology. Check. Ecotoxicology. Check. That's got to be like contaminants building up in animals.

Yep. So, why, if you eat too much tuna, your hands go numb and you can't remember why you called your friend. Exactly like that. Eco-toxicology. But with alligators. Oh, so within alligators. Yeah. And crocodiles.

They store that shit up. Oh, yeah. And they're really good at letting us know what's out there in the ecosystem. Huh. Yeah. I'll go on. Evolution, I'll buy that. Biogeography.

In part. Philosophy of biology. Oh, I'll buy that. Biogeography. In part. Philosophy of biology. Oh, that's my jam. Hmm. Yeah, we could talk about that. Herpetology, I'll buy that. Originally from New York City, I have a hard time buying that. And still a drummer in a band called the Clado Jams.

I don't know. Clado Jams, yep. I wish that wasn't brought up, but I guess it was. Corinne put it in the notes. Yeah, I don't know. Clayda jams, yep. I wish that wasn't brought up, but I guess it was. Corinne put it in the notes. Yeah, I see that now. But you don't know because as Yanni likes to point out to every single person that walks in the door, you don't get to see the notes. Did that help make you feel more comfortable?

I am so comfortable. Did I explain it? Exactly. That all of us would be looking at this document besides you, but then not to worry. It's better that way. Joined today also by Yannis Poutelis. Corin you, but then not to worry. It's better that way. Joined today also by Giannis Poutelis. Corinne, of course, is here. Wild Phil on the keyboards.

And, uh, what do you call that little thing you got down there, Phil? Just a soundboard. Soundboard. I'll take Wild Phil, though. And Brody Henderson is here. This is a quick promotion, something I didn't even know about until right now our guest still doesn't know about it because he can't see the notes mark canyon's working for wildlife tour

mark canyon how uh thanks for letting me know buddy yanni wanted to go he didn't know about it mark canyon says mark canyon our very own mark came from wired to hunt i've put together something called the working for wildlife tour which is great that's me editorializing back to mark to help bring attention to public land volunteer days by way of participating in promoting and documenting six of these events across the country so this is people this is uh you don't need to be one but i'm guessing a lot of hunters and anglers and maybe just other folk getting together to um do working for wildlife work on public lands okay the first event kicked off in massachusetts over the rest of the year they got them coming up in michigan idaho missouri mississippi, and Kentucky. If you want to help out. How are they going to find this link, Corinne?

Okay. You know what? Can you put it in the notes? Yeah. I'll put it. I'll put the link in the show notes, but you can also go to the meat eater website and let's see. The meat eater.com. Check it out.

You can search. Yeah. Working for wildlife in this, in a little search bar on TheMeatEater.com. Yeah. So if you're on Spotify, right, and you go, you're looking at Meat Eater podcast and you're thinking what you want to listen to and you see like, oh, that's a clever title. If you keep reading beyond the clever title, you land users getting together to volunteer to do wildlife work on public lands. Also, still out, still coming, our brand new title, Catch a Crayfish, Count the Stars. Available for pre-order now, ships in June. Again, it is an active...

How many activities are in there, Brody? Over 100? No, I think it's probably... Under 100. Probably around 80. Around 80 total activities to get kids engaged with, involved in, educated about the outdoors, educated about hunting and fishing and wildlife, educated about gardening, preparing foods in the home, celestial navigation, making various weapons. Everything you need to raise a smart, engaged kid who I like to point out has kind of a raw edge to him.

Catch crayfish, count stars. We just found out about some hoser on Amazon selling a fake, which I didn't know until this morning. It's very common. And I don't even think they go after them. I think they just shut them down. Where do they get the check stock? I would love to know. I don't know how they do it. I want to know if you get an actual book or if you just send money and just never see anything my wife said that one time

there was a guy who had somehow printed off and was selling my book but it was a spiral bound copy of one of my books he's just like making them in his kitchen yeah this guy's name is uh well it's probably not his actual name robert g burgoyne yeah i'll kick his ass. I'm running to him. Yeah. Don't buy that one. Oh, you know what happened last night? Did I tell you we got a 62 pound beaver over the weekend? Holy moly. Oh yeah.

So he had, this beaver had, I'm not kidding you, in the back of his skull, he had a mushroomed, a perfectly mushroomed 22 round mushroomed against the back of its skull. Shot him in the head, bounced right off. I mean like all the way mushroomed, a perfectly mushroomed 22 round mushroomed against the back of its skull. All the way mushroomed. That dude had to be like, got him! Yeah.

Just through the hide, laying against the skull. I'm going to save it. Well, I already did save it. Perfectly mushroomed lead 22 round baked against the back of its skull. But was there any cracks in the skull or any just flat there? Nothing.

Just an annoyance to that big beaver. Yeah. Jeez. You can imagine that dude all day was like, I swear I got him. Right in the head. Oh, so to get the book, go on Amazon, wherever you buy books. You know, in the old days, you'd get in trouble for sending people to Amazon because other bookstores would get annoyed. So go wherever you buy books. Call your local friendly bookstore, if you have a local bookstore.

That'd be a good idea. And tell me you want the book. It releases in June. So we're going to talk a lot more about it and do some stuff. But I've become intensely interested. Having three kids of my own, I've become intensely interested in making sure I expose them to the outdoors and to issues about wildlife management. And then if they grow up and become total city slickers, I'll at least know they got that floating around the back of their head. Carmen, right?

Should we talk to Carmen now? Man, we had on quite a few, what was that episode called, Corinne? Do you remember when we had Carmen Van Bianchi on? It was called Split and Delivered, episode 413. God, clever title. If you go back to the, if you go back to the episode called Split and Delivered, episode 413. God, clever title. If you go back to the episode called Split and Delivered. Oh, Corinna, on the point of that beaver. Mm-hmm.

With the. Yep. You know what I say? I heard about this, and I was going to bring it to you. Have you heard that you just take those feet and give them to those big ass back feet for chew toys for dogs? No, I had no idea. People do that.

That is a lot of bone. But it's like so much better to salt it, preserve it, and make like a pendant out of it. Yeah. I had something I was saving for you too. I got another thing to give you. I think I got it right here. Hold on a minute. So excited to see what this is.

Is it part of the beaver? Steve's digging around in his Yeti El Camino bag where there's beaver hats, orange vests. Oh, no. Then tell me what it is. Oh. Yeah? Okay. I'll find it.

Let's get Carmen on. Oh, so if you go back to the episode A few episodes back I see an episode called Split and Delivered In which, up top in that episode We spoke with frequent podcast guests We kind of tracked her through her career I don't want to say her young career

But yeah, like her, I don't know I think she's still in her young career yeah it's pretty you know she's just getting going as a biologist yeah it's been fun so we've had carmen on i don't know four or five times as she's gone through like tech positions and now she's very established with home range is a home range wildlife she came on the show and she has started with some colleagues of hers. They started a nonprofit wildlife research organization and they are working on a project where they're studying how lynx are using burned off landscapes. So, so successional forests coming in after these mega wildfires that we have in the West now, how links use those landscapes. Are those landscapes helpful to links? Like what, how do links interact with this new emerging, um, ecosystem out there that's coming in, in the back end of fires.

But one of the big things befuddling their efforts to get some links radio collared was having a bunch of snowmobiles that were like older than carmen carmen came on the show and she had put together a way to help her non-profit raise money for snowmobiles and my god did you guys um really come forth in a huge way? Carmen's embarrassed to admit how much money they raised. Yeah. Let's get her on the line. Let's get her on the line. We're just going to do a quick check-in.

Because they've been whacking the links. I don't think you say that when you're a radio caller. Probably not a good way to put it. All right, Carmen. So you guys, since you've been on, you and your colleagues at Home Range Wildlife have gotten three links. Yeah. Whacking them and stacking them.

We're pretty excited about that. Yeah. Yep. And you're trying to get four? Well, that would be amazing because we've got four callers, but we've already – one was my goal. So to have three is just awesome. We're already, now because we only have one caller left, we've got a couple more nights

with our traps open that we'll try for a miracle to get all four out. But otherwise we'll be, you know, getting more callers for next year. And so everything now is just sort of a cherry on top. What's the farthest that one of those links has strayed from the capture site yet? Oh, I haven't measured that, but not very far. They're hanging tight. They are not going very far. Yeah, which is kind of cool.

I mean, totally anecdotal at this point, but, and this, you know, my thinking may change down the road as we learn more. But one thing people have feared is that because they're living in what's a regenerating burn, that they, in theory, might have really large home ranges because the habitat quality could be poor. So to see that they're not covering a whole lot of ground could be a good sign that the habitat's richer than people have uh supposed got it and then uh can you give us a quick snowmobile update like where you guys are at on snowmobiles oh man we're in a good spot so we have since we were on, we got a nice 2021 Polaris that has been doing really well. And then we also were able to purchase two brand new Skidoo Expeditions that have just been awesome.

And we've already put almost 2,000 miles on those brand new sleds. Oh, really? Wow. Oh, yeah. We're going at least 50 miles a day, sometimes 100. Damn, really? We do a lot of riding. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Man, I want to switch jobs, man. Then you guys got a new trailer for them, too? We got a new trailer, an enclosed trailer, which for where we live that there are tons of marmots uh and mice and stuff that's going to be really nice for in the summer for storing them so we feel like we've protected our investment and yeah we're feeling pretty pimped out that is great i appreciate the check-in i know that uh man i had a lot of friends after you came out i had a lot of friends text me their little receipt things from having participated in the adopt-a-set thing.

And I know that I've been dealing with Ford, or Corinne's been dealing with Ford over at First Light to get the winners set up with their cold weather collection of First Light gear. So I appreciate you coming back on and checking it was i'm glad you guys got the snowmobile problem taken care of and uh hope you catch a fourth links thanks well we just appreciate so much you and your listeners the outpouring has been incredible so i just want to thank everybody for your support it's been super fun. I got one request. You don't need to print it, but can you make us, for our podcast studio, a graphic that has all the lines running around when you eventually look at all the data?

Oh, that's cool. Oh, yeah. That'd be awesome. So a different color for each link and show how they're zooming around? Yeah. I'd like that. And then when one dies, you're going to go find out what happened to it right yep yeah i want the skull off that lynx is that possible i'll tell you what that's one of the skulls that i don't have in my

collection so we might have to fight well i have the second one i'm not wishing i'm not like wishing ill upon your links you know i hope they have i hope they die old age someday oh hey i gotta tell you i got i gotta tell you a tip and then i'm gonna let you go all right we had that bobcat act that bobcat expert on mercer lawing and i think that you later had some communication with mercer about because he's he's he does a lot of cage. He catches bobcats for research. And also the fur markets. He, the other day, told me about how they were out doing the telemetry.

I think they still do that. Oh, yeah. Telemetry on a bobcat. And they lost the signal. And he thought it must have went into a cave or something. So he started wailing on a predator call cone all of a sudden got the signal back huh yeah like he pulled it out he like drew it he drew it out of its spot enough to pick the signal back up all right send me that post yeah you don't need to print it we'll print it but

send me my poster in that skull all right thanks steve thank you very much come you're welcome back on the show anytime all right bye carmen see you guys thank you everybody so much okay uh speaking of capturing and collar and stuff this is a crazy story so they just got the first ever wolverine, collared, and released in Utah. So basically, I don't know how well Corinne did her math on this. She thinks it was basically while we were recording our Wolverine episode with Rebecca Waters. Waters? Waters.

Waters. A Wolverine was seen in Utah. Okay. Only the eighth confirmed sighting in the state of utah since 1979 the first one ever captured biologists in utah this thing had had a busy morning he had killed how many sheep i think it was at 18 this guy killed this wolverine comes in and kills 18 sheep in a morning. What's the term for that when a predator goes? Surplus killing.

That's right. Yeah. Wait, let me make sure I didn't make a mistake. Yeah, 18. Ooh, we'll have to ask the croc guy if they do surplus killing. If gators do surplus killing. Crocs and gators. Let's ask him right now.

Right now. You know what surplus killing is? Killing more than you can eat, I'd imagine. They get a little carried killing. Crocs and gators. Let's ask them right now. Right now. You know what surplus killing is? Killing more than you can eat. I'd imagine. They get a little carried away. They get a little overboard. Yeah, they get in a pen full of llamas, like a mountain lion.

It's always domestic. I would kill them all. It's always domestic animals. Yeah, I don't really see that at all in alligators and crocodiles. I mean, they pretty much have a hard enough time eating what they actually are able to acquire. What do you mean? Shrimp and stuff.

I mean, they eat a lot of those, but if they grab a hold of something pretty big, it takes them a long time to actually, you know, actually do anything with that meal. Like a deer. So probably no surplus killing. If he kills a deer and he stashes it and another deer shows up, he's not going to grab that one and stash it too. Probably not. I mean, they'll typically like launch at a deer from the water's edge and they'll stick it in the water and then stick it under a log under the water until the meat gets a little bit, a little bit easier and then have a snack for a month or two.

They blow a lot of energy killing one large thing. Oh, yeah. Tons of energy. So they can't like recover and go kill another one. You know? Right. Yeah. So this guy, so they go in there and they want to catch it and put a collar on it.

They go in and clean up all the dead sheep. Then they set two barrel traps with hind quarters and later catch the wolverine. Where was this? Randolph, Utah? Giannis used to live in Utah. Where's that? Never heard of Randolph. In Rich County. Don't know where that is. Oh, they even brought it out

of the wild and into a lab of sorts to do the study, do the workup. Three to do the study, do the workup. Three to four years old, 28 pounds, 41 inches, tip of nose,

tip of tail. 41's big because Rebecca, I remember saying. 41 inches, 28 pounds. No, he's right in line. He's right in line.

He's cute. After that aired, I had a lot of friends sending me pictures of wolverines that they heard in the news or that they found or their buddy found. And then I'd be like, what's up with that? And he goes, well, that was eight years ago. I'm like, oh, okay. It's a cold trail now.

Randolph looks like it's about 80-ish miles northeast of Salt Lake City. Thanks, Phil. So that's pretty cool and interesting. Okay, this is the absolute final word. Corinne thinks it's perhaps the final word. It's the final word. Okay. It's the final word on refried beans.

I grew up... Someone wrote it. He says he's got a potentially controversial take on the whole subject. He grew up in New Mexico, but spent a lot of time living in Chile. I'm thinking about switching. Switching what? Well, I went from Iran to Iran.

Oh, it's Iran. I'm thinking about going from Chile to Chile. Matter of fact. I think you already made the transition. Matter of fact, I was doing one of my old books. I was doing a new audio because we got the audio rights back, one of my old books at the 10-year mark. And I had to do it, and I did Chile.

Sounded a little pretentious, but. Spent some time living in Chile. Not being a native Spanish speaker, I learned to speak fluently while living in South America. I believe this issue is more of a translation issue. The word in Mexican Spanish is frijoles refritos. Or in Chilean Spanish, perotos refritos. Am I doing semi good?

Yeah, he's fluent. The issue is the suffix re. In English, this suffix means to fry again. It would be taken to be fry again, refried. But in Spanish, this suffix

can mean very fried. You can add this to any word in spanish such as beating a dead horse like this topic which would be go on yanni caballo esta remuerto i don't know if this is true but when i hear refried beans i hear very fried beans i I don't know. I wish I would have even read that. I don't buy it. You don't? Not really, man. I think it makes sense.

Very fried beans? It might. I'm glad I read it. Guy's in Texas now. God, I wanted to talk about this for like an hour. Come on. Let's just jump in and get it over with Yeah it's an old story now It's getting old Kansas bans trail cams on public land I own trail cams

I like trail cams I as we speak have a trail cam On public land In a place that I'm going to visit I put it and I'm going to go on the one year mark and retrieve it last time i did is i had forgot to turn it on all winter all winter i drove my wife nuts talking about going up getting my camera i got in the coolest spot i'm like man can we go get my camera it's gonna be amazing all the shit's on my camera

and i go up there i'm like ah hadn't turned it on. Batteries are still good. Now, wait a minute. In Montana, can you have them out on public land? They can't transmit a signal. Oh, I thought you couldn't have them out on public land during big game season. No, I think they can't. If that's the case, I'm in violation. I could be making that up in my head, but I think that might be the case.

I thought you can't have anything that transmits a signal. You're talking to the wrong person. You might need to cut this out and I might need to go take my camera down. Yeah, sounds like it. For a while, there was no trail cam use. Then it became no trail cams that transmit a signal.

I thought there was a during big game season component to it. I could be wrong. Yeah, but it seems to change every year. I'm going to look right now. You can't use one that transmits a signal in any capacity toward using it to cat in the process of taking game. Well, if that's the case,

I'm going to call Adam Pankratz and turn myself in. I was just thinking about calling him. Back to Kansas. I don't think that's true. Is it true? Well, we should find out. Oh, Jesus.

It's not even a place I would hunt. Chris, do you guys ever use them for gators? Yeah, we do actually, especially around alligator nests and stuff like that. Yeah. But I have no idea regarding the legalities of that where we do either. Well, I'm sure for research purposes you don't have to worry about it. Okay, here's the semi-headline. I mean, like the one-liner.

The one-liner is this. With a unanimous vote by its game commission, Kansas becomes the first Midwestern whitetail state to impose a year-round damn trail camera ban. So what was it?

Arizona's was only partial? Only during hunting seasons? I think so. Well, Arizona's and Utah's was public-private. This, they did it for private land too. Oh.

I called a friend of mine. No, I don't want to say his name because I didn't ask him if I could say his name. i called a friend of mine no i don't want to say his name because i didn't ask him i could say his name i called a friend of mine who like he does a lot of scouting for outfitters and he finds a lot of animals you know and i said i said man what's your take on it he goes i love it i go you like the trail cam band love it he. He said, I'm a dinosaur. I've been in this business a long time. I've been in this game a long time. And glassing, looking for tracks, looking for sheds, that's where I excel. Because that's how I was brought up.

I learned my abilities being in the woods. Yeah, I fall on that side too. And he goes, and I got into it. Like I got into it. But for me, i think it's great and he said too he's talking about places like the the arizona strip he thinks you're gonna have it's gonna this is him speaking and like him guessing you're gonna have an improvement an age class box because he thinks it's gonna go back to being there's bucks people don't know

yeah yep he said in the in these areas like where he's at he said it's going to go back to being there's bucks people don't know about. Yep. He said in these areas, like where he's at, he said it's different. He goes, where you're at, there's a lot of water. He's talking about Montana. There's a lot of water. Here, water is the thing. Okay. All big game goes to water and there's a finite place for them to find water. So when you get in the late summer, okay, or whatever the dry season, probably not late summer,

but pre-monsoon, when you go out, you're like, any deer is going to go here, here, or here. Yeah, and everybody knows about those spots. And you lace it with cameras, and everybody knows about every deer. So he's optimistic that it's going to be that there's more deer slipping through the cracks,

and it's going back to being like that the woodsman find the deer and it's not and it's not a tech game i love it he he knew a guy he knew a guy that was running over 100 cameras oh yeah and that's common i don't i don't think that 100 cameras is out of the ordinary he had two guys uh they he talked about an outfitter that had two guys on payroll that only ran cameras. And searching for stuff for clients. Yeah.

I like the mystery of it all. So Kansas on public land. There is like, this is the thing I've become aware of in places. It just kind of depends. We were in a place in Florida where it was like, it was like being at a 7 7-eleven for the amount of cameras aimed at you on public land oh yeah yeah i could see it becoming um people that don't want to be surveilled and photographed and you have a sort of like expectation of privacy but in these areas where like all the roads all the trails are done it like i could see that it would get on people's nerves oh yeah um and like i said man i like like if if it became

that you couldn't i wouldn't right if you couldn't i wouldn't't, but I dig it. It's fun using them, but I'm empathetic of the situation. And the fact that all unanimous vote. No, it'll generate some hate mail because I think people will say, well, you guys get to hunt wherever you want to hunt, and you're always hunting some fancy private ranch, and you don't need to scout, and I'm working man i need these cameras to scout but it's we hunt a lot of public land and that hunt by having all those cameras that we had to walk by every single day multiple times

it changed the experience yeah then people are like sending you messages telling you finding you and on social like yanni had people sending him messages on telling you, finding you on social. Yanni had people sending him messages on social, being like, I know where you're at. That's ridiculous. Yeah, is this you guys? Which that part, I don't mind the person reaching out. I try to answer to all the DMs on Instagram.

That part's fine. But the experience of being out there hunting, I like to go into the woods to be alone and be quiet and not have things big brother don't belong in the woods they're watching you know i think another concern people have about these kind of laws too is that they're coming from these uh commissions they're appointed members and perhaps some of their like there might be a non-hunting angle coming from some of those commissioners like i've heard that in places too like the more you can restrict use the more you're restricting hunters you know so three

percent of kansas is public okay here's the interesting thing here's what one of the commissioners had to say he said so this is where he's going on he's not going on uh he's not he this commissioner is not speaking of the issue on a fair chase fair take okay like unfair advantage that's not where he's going with it commissioner gerald lauber said that trail cameras cause privacy issues and give rise to conflict when used on heavily trafficked public land in kansas he didn't say that here's what he says quote there are some deleterious issues when it comes to trail cameras in some places cameras are used to spy on other hunters and some people recoil from seeing a

camera they're private they don't want to have somebody take their picture and then have it on facebook which absolutely happens lauber went on to say that trail cameras are sometimes used by hunters as a means of staking claim to a particular section of public land. Bubbly Dog's got all kinds of thoughts about the whole thing. I can't even... I'll have to get back to it. It's so much, I have to dig into it.

Say about it. You can get mad at me all you want. I'm not on the Kansas Game Commission. Sure. I was reporting the facts, dude. It's the thing I see both sides. I see both sides to it. As a camera owner,

I like cameras. I have a subscription. I like putting them on beaver dams to see what all goes over the beaver dam. I like everything about them. If there was a thing where you couldn't use them, I just, I don't know. I'd be like, eh. Yeah.

I understand. It's not something, you know what it is? It's not something I would take up. It's not something I would take up the fight about. Because you can imagine, like, it's easy to imagine the extreme where the extreme being you can't walk down a trail without being photographed which is probably the case in many places you can't go down a path without being photographed the guy i was talking about i wish i could i should have checked with him to talk about he said now every camera you find in arizona's got a bullet hole through it.

Now they're illegal people to shoot them. He said, there's still ones just got abandoned out in the woods, but they've all been shot by pistols. Yep. Wow. Think about that, you know. Hardcore. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join.

Whew, our northern brothers. You're irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement.

You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit OnXMaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Okay, we're ready to dig in on gators.

Dude, I got some questions about gators, but first I want to tell you something. Did you hear about this? The Texas Zoo rescues an alligator that was stolen as an egg 20 years ago. Yeah, I did hear something about this on social media. I don't know the full story, though. A Texas Zoo, this was reported in The Guardian. I'm a little lukewarm on The Guardian. Sometimes I like it.

A Texas zoo said it had taken back an eight-foot alligator which was stolen as an egg more than 20 years ago then kept as a backyard pet. I mean, this is from Texas Park and Wildlife. A woman confessed to taking an egg from Animal World and Snake Farm Zoo near Austin. It's just a gnawing on her for 20 years. Had it for 20. That is heartbreaking. She was a volunteer at Animal Farm way back then, 20 years ago.

Apparently stole the alligator as an egg. She put it in her pocket. That's heartbreaking. Heartbreaking. It's actually kind of hard to do. I can imagine. If you have an alligator egg, it can't roll one way or another or the embryo will die.

Is that right? So she had to know what she was doing. Huh. She didn't put it in her pocket. Steal an alligator egg and incubate it long enough for it to hatch successfully.

That's pretty hard to do. 20 years. Maybe she learned that at the zoo. She put her training to use. You could make a Disney movie about this lady. It's 20 years.

And they took it back. Is it a mature gator at that point? Oh yeah. Eight foot alligator is mature. Yeah, look at this lady. It's 20 years. And they took it back. Is it a mature gator at that point? Oh yeah. Eight foot alligator is mature. Yeah. And I could see an eight foot alligator being 20 years old, especially in captivity. Talk about being able to see two sides of a story. I could see them wanting their alligator back for 20 years.

It's like losing a leg she faces misdemeanor charges for illegal possession of an egg and possession of an alligator without a permit i mean i get it i get it but but misdemeanor though i get it what do you think about that film? She shouldn't have done it? I don't know. Well, yeah, I know. I know.

Okay. Picture it. You shouldn't have done it. Okay. Shouldn't have done it. Everybody knows that. Sure. Does any little part in the back of your head be like, oh, it's like losing a leg.

Maybe she hated that alligator. I don't know. Looks like she took pretty good care of it. 20 years she's had that pet. A lot of chickens and rats, I imagine, huh? And she stole it as an egg, so it's like... What, you think it bonded to her? I'll take that to our guests.

The alligator bonded her. I have seen alligators that are pretty well trained. So I would imagine that she would have a pretty strong emotional attachment to that animal. I'm not sure about the opposite. So he's not crying crocodile tears? Probably not. When he goes back to the zoo zoo is he going to be completely thrown off and out of his element now or gosh i think that's tough with all crocodilians i mean

i think they're they're really good at just sort of surviving in whatever enclosure they're in until they're no longer surviving you know like it'll be fine i would imagine but what about her that's a different story. Can you see if she'll come on? Steve's more concerned about this. Can you see? He, like, hate New Jersey cat ladies, but he loved Texas gator ladies.

Texas gator ladies. Listen, if you said you could spend a weekend with a New Jersey cat lady or a Texas gator lady, what are you going to say? Okay, when you put it that way. Now, I know you don't like doing this very much, Krim, but can you please get her on the show for a call-in? Just a call-in. Okay. It's not that you don't like doing this very much, Crenn, but can you please get her on the show for a call-in? Just a call-in.

Okay. It's not that I don't like doing it. Tell her I said that I know it was bad, what she did. We all know what she did was bad, but we just want to hear about how tore up she is. Okay. Alright. And like what she fed it. Okay. I want to go back to the beginning on gators

and crocs in America, but first I want to, I got to clear something up, which I can't stop thinking about and talking about. I want to go back to the beginning on gators and crocs in America. But first I want to, I got to clear something up, which I can't stop thinking about and talking about. I had occasion. Yanni and I drew some pretty sweet wildlife management area turkey tags in Florida this year. But I was down a few days early and I did a little tour on some public land right up against Everglades or up against the national park. Okay.

Okay. So I went out with a guy that has one of them big buggies. You know, the ground was dry, but we took a swamp buggy, but you could have driven in a golf cart. Yeah. Golf cart. We did with a little swamp buggy tour just for gets and shiggles. Okay.

And, um, in big Cypress. Cool. Yeah. Beautiful. Dry as a bone. Okay. There was a canal that had water, but prior to it becoming, um, prior to becoming like big

Cypress, it had been at various times grazed by cattle and people had had little homesteads out there. So some of the areas out in Big Cypress, you'll run into groves. There'll be like fruit trees planted. You'll see like rusted old chunks of fence, hog fences. People would just kind of live and probably squatters.

Did you try eating any of that fruit that you saw hanging? We didn't find anything that was, any fruit that was fruiting. Oh. Except for sour oranges, which aren't that bad. Like some native, but see that wasn't even like native citrus, but it was in this area, so maybe someone would have just

cultivated it there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I found grapefruit and those oranges and it was kind of a bit, and it might have been past grapefruit and those oranges and it kind of bit bit and it might have been past due but yeah they were kind of just i don't want to say not mealy but grainy just a lot of that's what i had was like that yeah i mean you could eat it but it wasn't as you know you just been trained up on yeah on our sweet oranges so at a time someone had developed water holes for cattle okay and you and so when you're cruising around everything's like dry as a bone it gets wet sometimes but not right now it's dry as bone and you'll see these dirt tanks and you can even see like where years

ago someone had mounded all the dirt up so it'd be like a berm or an impoundment in a in some water holes that i'm not shitting you are not that much bigger than this podcast studio okay but there's some eight foot alligator laying there yeah i'm not surprised at all the hell is he eating like what is he doing probably just hanging out in water until there's a lot more of it i mean alligators a lot of research on alligators being really good ecosystem engineers so when the water goes away they will dig out a hole like that themselves that allow a lot of water to be there for other wildlife to come and utilize. Really? So they can do that themselves and do every year.

But how long can he wait before, like, presumably he's sitting there thinking someday someone's going to come get a drink. Yep, exactly. And I'm going to smack it. Yep. And it happens all the time. But how long can it not happen before he's got a split? Yeah, well, I don't think there's anywhere else to go, you know, for them.

But I'll give you an example. So in Costa Rica, American crocodiles will estivate during the dry season and bury themselves under the mud for like three months. Do you know that word, Steve? Estivate. No. Estivates like try to avoid dying from lack of water or heat. Right.

So like sometimes they'll go into the woods. We don't actually know what they do in the woods. Sometimes they'll go in like these little limestone cave things. And sometimes they'll just let the mud harden over top of them. And you can be walking around, they'll be under your feet, you can't see them.

But they'll stay there for a couple months before the wet season returns in like early to mid-May. Not even a chance to eat. Not a chance to eat. Just hanging out, waiting. So that alligator probably has a pretty good shot at being successful for however long it has to be there. The guy I was with told me that he's got, I can't remember what he called them, caves or dens. What was he calling them?

Probably wallows. Like holes he's dug out. The alligator holes. Yeah. I mean, they'll do that themselves. Talk about what that is. Alligator holes, really you only see that down in South Florida where there's times of the year where

there's lack of water. And there's been a lot of research on the utility of alligator holes. Uh, but they'll essentially dig out a hole that is, yeah, no bigger than this room we're in right now and allow themselves to hang out there in water for months. And other animals need to utilize those holes

as well. So that's what he's talking about like a like a little deep cave area he dug oh that's a wallow okay the alligators will dig wallows like in the sides of those holes that's what he's talking about yeah and they'll just go hang out in there underground um for a long time like a lot of. How are they digging? They use it all. They'll use their head, they'll use their front limbs and just make a big hole. In fact, I don't think we have

a lot of footage on them making those alligator wallows, which would be really cool footage to get. But I guess not in Kansas, because there's no cameras allowed. Well, the private land gators. Those are the spoiled gators. There you go.

Those are the spoiled gators. They got it made. But like every time you see an alligator nest, you'll see the nest up top. And then on the edge nearest the water, you'll see a hole. And mom usually is sitting in that hole or outside of that hole by her nest. If she's a good mom. Got it. I want to go back to the beginning on gators.

We should go back to the beginning on you too. How, um, you grew up in New York. Grew up in New York, New Rochelle, New York. Turned nine there, I think. Spent a year in England. My dad was a high school art teacher. Moved back to New York, moved to Connecticut to play high school baseball. That didn't pan out very well.

I'm a biologist, not a baseball player now. But you wanted to be a full-time baseball player. I wanted to be a baseball player. I'm just not good at baseball is the problem. Yeah, that could get in the way. Yeah. It's a hardship I couldn't overcome. How'd you get interested in, like living there where they don't have them, how'd you get

interested in them? Steve Irwin. Watching Steve Irwin on Animal Planet when I was a kid with my neighbor, I just got hooked. We'd watch it every week. And we actually bought one of those VHS recorders from a tag sale. And I would pretend to be Steve Irwin in the backyard with toads and snakes and stuff like that. Holding it up. I never watched him.

Wow, look at this. Is he the guy that had that tragic death where he got hit by a stingray right through the heart? That is true. Jeez. But yeah, we would make little home videos. And then he actually did a senior project when he was a senior in high school. Who did? My buddy.

Oh, okay. My neighbor. No, okay. My neighbor. No, I don't know. I don't know if he did. Where we went down to South Florida and went to a wildlife refuge and alligator farm. Mm-hmm. And we made a video there for his senior project. And that got me in touch with sort of the more hands-on aspect of working with these

animals. that got me in touch with sort of the more hands-on aspect of working with these animals and i said to myself i want to work here and then having worked there for a while i learned that this could be a real job for me so i went to college and before that like when you were a kid did you have like an affinity for going out and catching like garter snakes and frogs yeah in connecticut i mean i would catch everything i get my hands on me and my neighbor frogs and milk snakes and hog nose snakes and everything. I think it's just something that is in people. You gotta go catch stuff. It's called, it's called worry and wildlife. Yeah.

I mean. Kids used to do it all the time. Now their parents don't let them. Now they do it on an iPad. They worry wildlife on an ipad my kid does he likes to some of them stupid hunting video games oh it drives me crazy um and then you studied what what'd you study general biology in undergrad then went on for a master's degree at southeastern Louisiana University, where I am now. And I focused on, my advisor was an evolutionary biologist, but I did not focus on evolutionary biology at all.

I focused on the effects of stress on the reproductive output of American alligators in Louisiana and Texas. And I was there at a convenient time because the oil spill occurred. And so I was able to look at how the oil spill affected the stress of alligators as well how how the actual oil or how the activity around the cleanup what were you looking at well that's a tough thing to separate so there was this like dispersant stuff that was put out because in ecotoxicology, if it's out of sight, it's out of mind kind of thing. So it was sort of a combination of just looking at the entire scenario, either oil in the marsh I was working in, in Southeast Louisiana, or the dispersant stuff that was used.

Turns out large alligators just leave and small alligators stay and get really stressed out. So the dispersant was meant to make it, the alligators wanted to split? It's hard to tell if it was the oil or the dispersant. What is dispersant? Yeah, so it's this chemical they put out in oil spills. I don't know much about it. I understand now. It prevents the oil from getting together with other oil molecules.

I thought you meant they were putting something out to try to drive to disperse animals. To try to get gators to move away from the oil spill. No, it's an oil spill cleanup tactic, I believe. I got you. So the impacts of that. And the little ones that stay get stressed out. Was it impactful

on them? Yeah, they get pretty stressed out, which was obviously expected. But large ones just leave. And the results of getting stressed out was it impactful on them yeah they get pretty stressed out turns out which was obviously expected yeah but large ones just leave and the results of getting stressed out or what like loss of weight slower growth like yeah that's an interesting question i think that the results of getting stressed out are you know a lot of physiological things um you know you can't allocate a lot of energy to your immune system when you're stressed out. So you're more susceptible to the environmental problems that are already in your face that alligators can pretty well handle when they're not stressed out. When you, I would say that most Americans do not know that there's a crocodile in America. American crocodile, South Florida.

How many of them? Like, I mean, did they used to be pretty thick? Did they used to be that they were eating people and stuff all the time, like African crocodiles in the Nile or whatever? Yeah, I don't really think that they ever became a human-crocodile conflict issue in South Florida. I mean, I think they are now because there's just so many people in such little space.

But there's a great book that recently came out maybe five or six years ago that talks about the Spanish when they settled South Florida. Yeah, they would talk about it. And talking about just how many alligators there were. And specifically there's mention of like on the, what would it be, Southwest side of Florida towards like Sanibel Island. How many American crocodiles there were? Lay out the difference between an alligator and a crocodile. So, okay, are you ready for this? Yeah.

This is a question that people ask a lot and it's not easy for a crocodile biologist to answer. Because you guys like to obfuscate everything. Yeah, we're terrible. But the issue is that there's like 16 species of crocodile. Globally. Globally.

And there's eight species of alligatorid, including caiman. So to say, what's the difference between an alligator and a crocodile? It's a difficult situation. It's a difficult thing to answer because there's so much variation. Let's do it. Let's stick to the american alligator and the american crocodile okay and let's stick to from a late from a layman observer's perspective gotcha let's do it like meaning you're hanging out on vacation in florida and you see a crocodile

alligator-esque creature and you say to yourself i wonder if that's a gator or a croc sure what are you looking at i'm looking at a couple things the shape of the snout is sort of the obvious answer alligators have a more rounded snout and the american croc's going to have a more narrow longer pointed snout but i'm also looking at other things like where is it? Is it in an estuarine environment? If so, I'm leaning towards an American crocodile. Is it in the Everglades or big Cypress National Preserve or somewhere more where there is no salt intrusion? That'll lead towards an American alligator in that scenario. But they're pretty easy to tell just by looking at them. So could the American crocodile just head out into open saltwater?

Yes. There's one or two species of crocodile, the saltwater crocodile, hence the name, and the American croc that readily enter marine environments and disperse from islands to other places throughout the ocean. So it's feasible that you could be out in the ocean, 10 miles offshore or something, and here comes a crocodile swimming by. In Costa Rica, that happens all the time to surfers and other people out there, especially on the Pacific coast. Just see them. Yeah, they're just out there. Look like logs on the top of the water.

Then they go under and then you get off your board are they hunting what are they doing out there i i think for yeah i mean they're they're eating out there you know i think a lot of people like to think of crocodilians in general as eating large animals right sure but i think you know what we know from a lot of really good research in South Louisiana and Southeast Texas is that alligators eat a lot of blue crab. And we know that American crocs are eating a ton of shrimp when they can. So, yeah. So I think like. Like how in the hell are they doing that?

They just go out and open their mouths and swim and shrimp goes near them. In fact, I saw a video, I saw a video last night on social media of a crocodile using its tail to flick shrimp up in the air and they were landing in his mouth. It was awesome. I'll try to find that video for you. Wow. Is the crocs like in Costa Rica, the ones that

get real big, same exact species as the one in South Florida? Yes. How as the one in South Florida? Yes. How come the ones in South Florida don't get big? They get pretty big. Do they? Oh, yeah. Well, they get bigger than a gator.

They're all 14. Yeah. Yeah. Hmm. South Florida is a tricky scenario in terms of American crocs because there's so much, there's so little habitat and so much attention paid because they're the only American croc as you say in the continental US or in the US in general so the numbers are pretty low so they're sort of of high conservation concern and

there's really been a really good effort to monitor populations in particular successful nesting events sort of in collaboration with land use down there. A lot of folks at like University of Florida have spent a long time studying those populations. Like how many are there? How many were there and how many are there? It's hard to say how many there were. I'm going to make an educated guess and say more. But I would say right now, I think a colleague might correct me, but I would say 1,000 American crocs in South Florida would be a generally good ballpark.

Not including hatchlings. And they can at times be intermixed with alligators. Yeah, especially way down in South Florida. Like if you go down to like Nine Mile Pond, Flamingo, way down there in Neverglades National Park, you'll be in water bodies where you can see them both. And they can be 14 feet. Crocs, yeah. I mean, alligators too. Eating shrimp.

Eating crabs. I like to think of them eating wild hogs. Eating fish. I know, that's the cool stuff. That's the cool stuff. Deer and hogs. Oh, yeah, man. Like doing crazy stuff.

I mean, really, whatever swims near their mouth, they're going to try to eat. You know, when I was down there, I was with Clay, my colleague Clay, Nukem, and he was saying, man, if you came to me and said, you have to go get attacked by a

bear. He said it'd actually be hard to get attacked by a bear. There's actually a movie about this where a guy got mauled by a grizzly. Then he built a grizzly proof suit. He couldn't get mauled again. He tried his ass off to get mauled again in his grizzly proof suit, but could never get mauled again. So Clay's like,

you couldn't, if you said to go get mauled, you probably are going to fail. But he said, I feel like, and he doesn't know the first, he doesn't live in gator country. He said, you don't live far from gator country. No, but he said, I feel like if you told me I had to get mauled by a gator, I'd be able to figure it out.

Yeah, that's definitely a possibility. I mean, I think that's a lot easier. So, cause yeah, cause we don't, we don't know cause we're not familiar with them But we thought like how would you not go to that little pond Where you know that some bitch is in there And stick your foot in there and wiggle it around How's he not gonna wanna bite it

Well he might be afraid You know I think the easiest thing to do is to Make yourself look like you're the size Of a manageable prey item That's what happens when you see All these media reports of stuff getting eaten is that they're usually in the water partway or the size of a

small dog or something like that. So I would go to the pond and I would kneel at the water's edge. This is you trying to get bit. Up to my waist, kneel down, look small at night. Then you'd have a good chance. And you could pull it off have you ever been have you ever been part of like an investigation of an attack at all

done any work on that stuff without going into too much detail yes but you can't say if you do go let's say okay let's do the version where you do go into detail. Yeah, I mean, there's been situations. Can I kick things off? Please. My teacher, I'm not joking, man. I don't know if she's still alive or not. I don't want to say her name. I can tell you that she lived on the Muskegon River.

I don't want to say her name. I'll have to look and see if she's passed away or not. My fifth grade teacher was in the Peace Corps in Africa. And I think she got reprimanded for this. She brought us photographs into school

and showed in school photographs of the remains of her boyfriend who was recovered from the belly of a crocodile in Africa. Oh, God, no. Whoa. Yikes. So now you go.

Now I go. Now you tell us what you're talking about. I just spilled the beans. You know, I think when there's human-crocodile conflict in the population that involves a population of animals that a particular researcher works in, they like to get as much information as they can on who or which animal they think was responsible for the attacks. And I have been inquired about who is involved. The problem is it's an impossible thing to answer oh someone want to know which of the gators that you might be looking at and what could they tell about its behaviors

and whatnot yeah do i have any ideas on if which alligator may have done this yeah it's like when they try to go after the rogue shark or whatever right yeah right and i find that a little bit ridiculous i mean if it's in a scenario where there's an alligator in a communal pond in Florida, and that's where somebody went missing, well, it was that alligator. You're like, I got it. There it is. It's that one. That's an easy one.

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

I want to go with it. And I know that you're a good person to ask this because you're not going to want to sensationalize stuff because you're dealing in facts. And I gather you like the animals. I do very much. So you don't want to sensationalize this. But I'll say this in the okay in the lower 48 every year

grizzly bears kill zero one two or three people there's never more than two or three sometimes there's none usually there's one okay where are we at with alligators alligators and crocodiles in america like about the same right yeah i gosh i don't know in recent years of reported crocodile attack okay so that's not even a thing i mean maybe one every five years. Got it. As an educated guess.

So it's like not, I would declare that not a thing. Not a thing. I would also agree. Yeah. Alligators, I think, I mean, I would say annually we hear about some news story where there was an alligator attack. Right. But we don't hear about it 50 times a year. We hear about it one, two, or three.

So it remains almost in the category of not a thing i yeah i think so when you're an alligator country are there are there things that you just don't do make yourself the size of a prey item at the water's edge and that becomes like a widely known thing. No, otherwise it wouldn't happen. I mean, I think that. Let's say we are at these ponds. Okay. And I had my kids with me, which could totally happen.

And when my kids get near a pond, what do they want to do? They want to go throw shit in the pond. Yeah. Okay. So they're down. Including themselves. Yeah. They're down throwing shit in the pond, falling into the pond.

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

No, I mean, they are hell on dogs. I think that most of the time, like there was a couple of videos recently where the dog got attacked and the owner went to save the dog. And I think that leads to a lot of this stuff. Um,

when they're walking their dog near a pond, those dogs have the same inclination to go to the water's edge. And then alligator says, ooh, a prey size organism. I'm going to eat that. And the owner says, no, you're not. And then that leads to an issue between the alligator and the owner.

Because he's in there trying to duke it out. Because they're trying to save their dog, which I get as well. So my suggestion is don't walk your dogs near the water's edge. If you know that there's an alligator in that pond, or even if you don't, if you're not sure, don't walk your dogs near the water's edge. If you know that there's an alligator in that pond, or even if you don't, if you're, if you're not sure, don't do it.

Name for me all the junk you've heard of them eating, because it's a crazy list, right? Okay. Yeah. So we've, we opened up 13 big harvested alligator stomachs, um, from a kind of a unique habitat, a reservoir in Alabama on the Chattahoochee River.

And we found- How big? The alligators? Yeah. 13, 14 feet. Damn. Big. And they stunk, man.

But we found- They stunk, just the animals stunk. No, when you open that gut. I mean, stuff's been in there a while, rotten. It's the worst smell I've ever smelled. And I can smell it to this day if I try hard enough. It was on our clothes. It's called deja poo, what you're experiencing.

We cover that. Yeah. We're like the leading source on deja poo. This podcast is a leading source of information on deja poo. Yeah. We found so much stuff in those guts, particularly. We found fish scales from stuff like alligator gar, longnose gar, spotted gar. We found an entire hog parts all in there.

Turtle scoots from alligator snappers, which is a hard thing to eat. Snake vertebrae. What's a scoot? Like the keratinized plates on top of the shell. And then the coolest thing we found was a fawn that looked like it was asleep in the gut. It was about that big. And it was just sitting in there. Like a curled up dog?

Like it was asleep. Like he was going to get around to digesting it at some point. Exactly. Eventually that thing was going to pass through, but, uh, not that day. Jeez. How long had it been in there? Oh, I don't know. It was, it was incredibly intact.

So I would say not long, but he also found a lot of manmade stuff in there. A lot of shell casings in there and bullets. I don't know. Shiny stuff. Yeah. A lot of shiny stuff. And I still don't know if the alligator had eaten things that had been shot or if people were shooting at the alligator and it didn't die.

Are the bullets deformed or the bullets in their original state, like pre-firing? Original state, not mushroomed like on the, on the beaver skull or anything. But if you shoot an alligator in the back, it's kind of soft. So you found casings. We found it all. We found whole bullets.

The casing, I mean, you know, I mean like he's just eating the casing. He's just eating stuff, yeah. But then you found also just the projectile, the bullets. Not mushroomed. Like a lot of them. I also could imagine that when. I wonder if that's like, yeah, I wonder if that's picking up. Like a lot of times if they're trying to eat something off the bottom,

they'll get a lot of other stuff in their mouth. So they're probably just scooping up. Yeah, did you ever hear about the one that had some Indian arrowheads in it? Mm-mm. Remember that? I remember hearing that, yeah. Eating so much garbage off the bottom, he actually inadvertently, assumably, assuming, he inadvertently picked up.

Type that in, Corinne, and type in alligator arrowhead. A flint arrowhead. I forget where that was, yeah. Go on. Well, that's really awesome. No, but the bullets, do you have pictures of the bullets? No. I mean, this was 2011, 2012.

Got it. Around then. Mississippi. Mississippi. Mississippi. Read that. 2011 2012 got it around then mississippi mississippi yeah read that this might tickle your fancy uh the title is out this is cnn just so happens alligators eat lots of things these prehistoric artifacts were an unusual snack so this was a mississippi gator in well the guy who found it was based in yazoo City, Mississippi, but he found, yeah, part of, uh, like the base part of an arrowhead and then some other kind of like, uh, like an atlatl dart point. Yeah.

No, like a counterbalance to an atlatl, I think if I remember. So when he picks that junk up, what's he doing? He just inadvertently getting it while he grabs other stuff. Yeah, I'd imagine so. Like, have you ever seen an alligator attempt to eat something off the bottom? They're horrible at it. They just sort of turn their head and kind of rub on the bottom, and anything that's in their mouth, they'll lift their head up and might go down.

Is it just like like a shovel basically i mean it's yeah like uh like if you were to take two shovels and try to use them as a tool to lift something up off a table you know and they're and you're really bad at it so so is the alligator they just siphon all that junk down it all goes down if they get what they want to eat whatever else is near that thing is going down. Lay out for me how, this is the thing I hear about, people like to talk about the death roll, and then them burying junk and scavenging junk,

and if they catch a person, they'll stash a person under a log or something, or a deer. Walk me through all that. So here he is, he's laying there, and a deerash a person under a log or something. Yeah. Or a deer. Walk me through all that. Like, so here, here he is, he's in his, he's laying there and a deer comes out to get a drink. Okay. Laying there, he's seeing the deer at night at

the water's edge, he's under the water, he or she's under the water and approaches slowly under the water until he's near enough to attack the deer. Mm-hmm. Happens in a millisecond. If he can get ahold of the animal, he'll bring it back into the water. He'll grab it by the leg.

He'll grab it by whatever he can grab and then walk back into the water with it. And usually the prey dies by drowning. Okay. But then what happens is, this is a thing that some colleagues of mine have published recently about, it's called prey caching. Okay. So they'll go like find a wallow or a log or a big rock. You skip the death roll.

Is that a real thing? It's coming. It's coming. Oh, it's coming? Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's coming. It's already dead.

It's dead. But how do they get a leg off of a big deer? Gotcha. They death roll. And a lot of times- I just want to make sure you're not- I'm going there. I'm not leading you away.

Yeah. So they'll take that animal and stick it under the water for a couple days a week and then they'll re-approach it do they guard and roll off i don't think that there's data to suggest that a single animal will guard a prey cache well how does how does it not just like if you stick a deer under the water how does every gator in town not come and eat it? Yeah, I mean, I think they do. I think a big alligator might have some say in who comes and eats it. So like a large male crocodilian usually has a home territory.

And if a smaller male comes into that territory, they either get eaten or got to go. Got it. in that territory, they either get eaten or got to go. Got it. So if they put it in a spot that's theirs, I doubt there's much of a struggle. I understand. Granted, if another alligator sees that deer being pulled into the water, it's going to make an attempt to try to eat something. So either at that time or after caching has occurred, they'll bite onto what they think is a

swallowable size part and roll it off. Do a death roll underwater, roll it off. Or that alligator trying to come steal a meal might latch onto something and roll and get a bite to come off. So him, that's his fork and knife. Yeah, his teeth. His roll.

Yeah. What about sense of smell like you met you talked about they see this deer at the water's edge but like dudes who go out and like are catching crocs for whatever the commercial market meat or whatever they're often like hanging a big chunk of chicken like yeah are they fine in that? I'm assuming by smell, right? Yeah. You know, we don't know a lot about the chemosensory ability of crocodilians. We know that it's probably pretty complex.

Like we know that they probably use a lot of pheromones to communicate. But gosh, it's a challenge trying to isolate that stuff. I don't think anybody's really looked into that too much. But they don't have a mechanism by which you can, they can't smell underwater, correct? Yeah. I mean, I think so. I mean, when you hang that piece of chicken and it's rotting in the Louisiana sun and some of it starts to drip off into the water, they know it's there. Okay. So he doesn't need to, but he, yeah, well he does because he's taking, he's taking water in.

But when you're underwater, you're not going to smell underwater. You're not taking, you're not taking anything in. You're not taking to smell underwater you're not take you're not taking anything in you're not taking part but all that's like all that liquid is passing through their nostrils i don't know that's why i'm that's why i would assume that's why we have a guest on the show yeah and this is i don't know if that's true like when you sound like you knew it was very true no when no i'm telling you this when you go underwater okay like a beaver let's say you're trapping beaver and you put out beaver caster right he knows about it when he's at the surface

he's gonna smell it on the air when he's underwater he's locked down he's not he's he's not inhaling and picking up particles a shark's underwater moving all that water through and however they're doing it they're tasting all the particulate matter in the water you're not buddy yeah but humans have a horrible sense of smell so how can you make the comparison I'll put you underwater okay I could put you underwater with some skunk smell right Right But I'm not A damn alligator I know I'm not either Can they smell underwater?

I'll say this When they're hunting They use their sight first I'd imagine You think so? In certain scenarios But the other thing we know About all crocodilians

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

Underwater even. Underwater. Underwater, Brody. I figured. Dude, in trivia? No, man. When there's gator questions, I'm going to be all over that. Hey, folks.

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Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Now I want to go back to the beginning a little bit. Why? You always hear the alligators were one so endangered species act was 73 1973 oh no i got another question okay before i get into this uh this is the thing i was wondering about when i was in florida and this might not be your i'm sure it's not your area of expertise but maybe maybe you've had some run-ins on this. One, I learned that when we say the seminal, okay, that that was a sort of a – I always thought that the seminal – I thought the seminal were a sort of like always existing like a like a pre-contact pre-existing tribe of native americans that lived in florida i later learned that the seminal was sort of like a later congregation of a later congregation of native americans and even others escaped slaves and things like formed this

sort of like unit the seminal and then the seminal wars was against these tribes but they were that they were assembled out of other tribes so had you asked me a month ago i would ask the question this way how did the seminal did they use these did they use alligator resources in their life ways for food and material products? But now I know that you wouldn't say that. You'd say groups that don't know their names. Have you ever had any exposure to this question? Like historically, like 500 years ago, 600 years ago, were humans using this resource? I've never been asked that question before but i would

venture to say yes because i know that in like uh artifact sites where they find a lot of stuff they find a lot of alligator scoots got it in some of those sites um i mean i'm sure they were used for food. Yeah. When I was talking with Clay about this, he's like, well, why in the hell not? I'm like, I don't, I mean, it seems obvious, but I don't know. Yeah. Why not?

I mean, I think that there's in South Florida in particular, there's a, there's a lot of sort of heritage based, sort of cultural based, you know, efforts to alligator wrestling as a sport that I believe, if I'm not mistaken, has pre-European contact ties. Someone told me that as well. Yeah. I don't know if that was true. So that would venture to guess, you know, at that time, then yeah, they were probably

utilized as a resource. No. I realize I'm asking you something way outside of your wheelhouse. That's okay. But I appreciate the input. I'll comment on anything. No, here's my question. Okay.

They're everywhere, dude. Like now, okay? I couldn't believe. When we were turkey hunting, right in our little turkey area, there was like this, they were laying on top of each other. You're going down this canal and it's dry right now so i understand they're concentrated but you're going down a canal and you get to where you don't eat like at first because we're from the north you're like oh my god like you know and the guy we're with that's from florida he don't he can't he don't even look

he just mean like oh my god my God. Are you seeing this? You know? Yeah. Richard just rolled his eyes. He's like, holy shit, man. We're like, there's another one. They're all over. You know?

I'm not saying there's too many. I'm just saying there is a lot. But it blows my mind that like in 73, they were kind of like one of the early endangered species act things how did they how did they get reduced that bad you know i mean when you look at like how abundant they are yeah so that's a the sort of classic story of unregulated harvest for meat and hide and they were just harvest i mean throughout the 40s 1950s into the 60s there was really no legislation that said you can't harvest as many as you can find and um you know they nearly went extinct it was it was that from like mechanically it wasn't it wasn't from pollution now well

that was not the major culprit at that it. It was like you were mechanically one by one. Removing. Killing them all. Yeah. I mean, of course, pollution and habitat destruction have a hand in any decline in species numbers. Yeah. But this was directly tied to unregulated harvest. Yeah.

But I mean, there is like, you get my distinction, right? Like if you look at something, you know, the, the cormorant, when the cormorant was in peril, the cormorant was in peril because of, of like biotoxins. Right. And certainly we lost certain or almost lost some avian predators from, what was it, what was it? DDT? What was it?

DDT. Yeah. From, from DDT. So it was like, you know, environmental factors drove them to near extinction. Compare that to sort of, um, you know, the American buffalo, it'd be like, by and large, they were mechanically removed. I mean like one, two, three, like kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill to the point where

you killed them all. Yep. And that's what I couldn't understand. It's like, so with gators, it's like the gator hunters literally just like got them all. Yep. Completely unregulated. Well literally just like got them all. Yep. Completely unregulated. Well, that's the story, right?

I mean, there's a fair bit of commercial harvest of wild gators now. Well, that's what saved them. Ironically is the regulation on harvest actually saved them. More than that, the utility of the American alligator as a natural resource became monetized in such a way that was reliant on successful wild populations. How did they bake that up? So there were sort of two teams of people, one in southwest Louisiana and one in South Carolina, that were sort of working towards the same end goal at the same time. And I'm not sure if they collaborated or not. But essentially how it happened was that ranchers and harvesters, especially ranchers for eggs for hides, had to harvest eggs from wild populations near where they were located or otherwise.

And they had to return a bunch but if you're monetizing if you're making money off of the existence of eggs being out there there's got to be eggs out there the next year so really the amount of money that went into alligators as a natural resource saved the american alligator because now all these folks need there to be a bunch of alligators out there every year what um like if you base it on pounds of meat or number of hides like total in the u.s what would be the percentage coming from wild gators versus like farm if you had to guess i've seen these stats i can't i was looking Yeah. I, I would venture that most of the hide industry comes from wild populations, but they're required to put back a ton of alligators every year that they're not allowed to harvest.

They have size limits and things like that. Well, they have, they have, I think in most states, they have proportion limits. So, whenever you collect an egg, you got to put half of that back or a quarter of that back or a third of that back. But I would imagine that the meat industry recreationally is all from wild harvest. But I'm not sure about, you know, large-scale meat operations. I've never seen a farm whose sole product is alligator meat, but I'm sure they exist. Because they're trafficking hides too.

Yeah. I mean, hides is where the money is. That's the big money. Yeah, hides are where the money is. And that's for boots. So hold on. All manner of things. Did I miss it?

How do they get the eggs back? And how does that come into play? So I think most states have it where you harvest eggs, incubate eggs, hatch them out, and then a large number of what you hatch out has to go back to where you harvested those eggs. Why not just leave half the eggs? Because there's probably a higher likelihood that it's going to be a successful, it's probably a higher likelihood there'll be a successful reproduction. If you hatch them yourself. I mean, like when they're doing stuff with, when they're doing stuff with salmon, like you could take a salmon, you take a salmon out of the wild, take its eggs and then you

bring them, um, you rear them, you know, you're, you're close to like a hundred percent of those eggs putting off a fingerling. Yeah. I mean, I think. In the wild, it'd be like, maybe like zero or 1% would make it that far. Yeah. They do leave a lot of nests out there.

I mean, it's impossible to harvest all these nests, but there's some great data out of central Florida in the nineties that suggests that the number of eggs that are laid in a specific area, only about a third or less of those eggs reach one year old after hatching. So survivorship is super low anyway. So to leave them out there would be kind of a futile task. Got it.

But it's a great story. How do they go? The recovery of the alligator. Talk about like walk me through how an alligator like what is its reproductive cycle? So yeah an American alligator typically lays its eggs June, July. And you can tell, so if you live in Texas, egg laying anecdotally starts in Florida and spreads westward. So if you have egg laying in Florida, you can expect it to be upcoming in Alabama. You can expect it to be upcoming in Louisiana and finally over there in East Texas. What time of year does she, and how, does she, will she make love with a lot of males or

is it just, are they somewhat monogamous? Yeah, no, alligators have sperm storage and multiple paternity. We know that from a lot of work actually in Louisiana. So yeah, there'll be more than one. So she'll breed with multiple males and then so those eggs could bear multiple fathers. It could be represented by multiple fathers. Yeah. Some data from Cayman populations suggest that even though females are breeding with multiple males, there's really only one or two males that sire pretty much all the eggs. Got it.

Um, but it's possible. Uh, and so that, that courtship occurs, you know, in springtime, you know, in South Florida, March, April, um, and then a little bit later as you know, in South Florida, March, April. Yeah. And then a little bit later as you move more north and more west. And then eggs are oviposited, you know, nests are constructed in essentially overnight and laid in mid-June, late June, early July. Laying out, and they're laying out on the surface in like a little nest. The mounds, yeah.

So they'll build mounds of like degraded vegetation. Well, they'll, it won't be, it won't be rotting vegetation at the time, but they'll harvest, you know, spartina, grass, whatever sort of vegetation's available on the, on the, on the edge of the water. Mm-hmm. And they'll build a mound of it and then lay their eggs within that mound and then seal the mound up. So it's a pretty compact little thing. How many eggs? The lowest I've ever seen is 19 and the most eggs I've ever seen in this is 52. But I think you would say they would probably average 35 eggs or so. Damn.

So there's a lot of disparity in the number of eggs that a mother will overposit man you can see it it would be impactful if you took those and protected them and incubated them you get a lot of returns a lot of gators back out there so then continuing the timeline what do we got we're in early july and she hangs out by that nest if yes, yes. So alligators typically, well, typically they don't. But I would say about a third of alligators will hang out by that nest really early to start. And then they'll sort of ease off the nest during the middle of development and then return to the nest to assist with hatching. Well, they do. Yeah.

So they're really good moms in the front end. And are they reliable to come back to their own nest? Like another year? No, no, no. I'm saying it wouldn't be like, she's going to return to the nest she laid. Right. She's not going to just randomly just go to any old nest. Like she knows they have fidelity to their own nest.

They do. Although there's some really cool data out of South Carolina that suggests that there's potentially some kind of altruism in nest defense. So like they found footage of multiple mothers defending the same nest and they were sort of unsure why at that time. That's. But normally the assumption is that yeah mom will hang out by her nest in a wallow and defend it or not from a predator and there's a degree to which they defend like if you pull up in a boat some moms will just run away and hang out 100 yards away and say what are you doing my nest? Other moms will attempt to roll the boat over.

So you get it from time to time, but alligators are probably the most frequently, they, they will attend and defend the nest as frequently as any other species of crocodilian. Got it. So she'll hang out, lay it, and then how long does incubate or how long do they lay there? That's incubation, right?

Yeah, incubation. How long is incubation? Duration, alligators, on average, about 65 days. And is it true that the temperature determines? The sex of the hatchling? Yeah. Yes, it is true. So that nest will throw all males or all females,

depending? It could, depending on the temperature. But usually there's a, well, usually there's a thermal regime within the nest cavity that allows for potentially both sexes to be produced. But it could be manipulated where 30 eggs are all male. Yeah. If you put it in a lab and put it at like whatever, you set the temperature for like 78 degrees. Yeah. Or whatever the hell it is. That, you set the temperature for like 78 degrees. Yeah. Or whatever the hell it is.

That'd be like 81 and a half to 83 Fahrenheit. Is the temperature regime for one sex? Yeah. So it's, they exhibit FMF sex termination. It's called type two sex termination. So at low incubation temperatures, you get females. And then at this sort of narrow range, you get females and that this sort of narrow range you get males and when you get above that second uh pivotal temp you get females again but there's some argument that that upper pivotal

temp is never reached uh more more coming on that next time i'm here what happens you guys are working on that right now somebody it's not me what happens happens if that nest gets raided by a raccoon or whatever? All the eggs get destroyed. Does she just start over? She can't start over. She may wait until next year. There are a few species of crocodilian that have multiple clutches in a year, but that's very rare. What's the primary nest robber?

Raccoons. By far. Raccoons and hogs. That old bandit. Hogs like them. Getting turkey eggs and alligator eggs. I just have a question

for what you're saying within one nest based on the temperature regime you can have males and females. Is there any data on like how eggs are dispersed

within the nest in terms of like an area under more vegetation which would be colder or warmer or like if there's any kind of yeah yeah so those questions we thought would be really interesting to ask in whole nesting animals like the american crocodile what we find in american alligator nests is that they're essentially within a compost pile of rotting vegetation. And the temperature seems to stay relatively hot and relatively stable in there. I mean, yeah, there are nests that bridge that lower pivotal temp, which means males

and females will thermally be produced. But we had the same idea as you in Costa Rica. So the American crocodiles dig holes in the sand and deposit their eggs in there. Like similar to a turtle. Exactly like a turtle. Yeah. Just a lot more eggs and a lot bigger. So they'll pull up on a sandbar and.

And dig with their back feet and oviposite and then. Covered up. Covered right back up. But we thought, yeah, if it's under some shade, under a tree, then that may play a role in the thermal regime of that nest. Or deeper in the sand. If it's really deep in the sand, exactly, then that will also probably play a role.

But we actually found that neither of those things matter at all. They're completely uncorrelated to the thermal regimes of these nests. But what happens to be correlated is the egg size. So metabolic heating is playing more of a role in determining the thermal regime of these nests than how much shade or how deep the nest is. That's a sample size of, you know, 14 or 15 or so nests, which was hard enough to get. Meaning the same way that the human body generates heat. Metabolic heating, yep.

Metabolism, heat is given off in exergonic reactions. So the larger the egg in there. And that is a generating warmth in there. It's generating warmth in the nest, yeah. So off in exergonic reactions. So the larger the egg in there. That is like generating warmth in there. It's generating warmth in the nest, yeah. So we put in these little eye buttons. It couldn't be that you put your hand on it and it felt warm. It's just like slight, right? 2.5 degrees C.

So we put an eye button in the center of the nest cavity. And then we put an eye button at the exact same depth of that eye button, a meter away from the nest. Okay. And we found that the average difference in temperatures between those two little eye button loggers was two and a half degrees Celsius, which is a lot. Hmm. Right? What is that? No kidding, man.

Somebody Google that. It's got to be like five or six degrees Fahrenheit or more. So when those little baby alligators are ready to, how many days gestation or not gestation? Alligators incubation about 65 on average. So she lays them. Yeah. And she might skedaddle.

She could. She might. Yep. But then she might come back around hatch time. Well, she usually come back around hatch time. Well, she usually stays there for a week or two after ovipositing. Defends the nest, is hanging around. You see them at the nest.

And then we find that the frequency of attendance goes down towards the middle of incubation. Likely because mom's got other things to do. She probably hasn't eaten in a couple weeks. She needs to seek some other thermal refugia besides sitting on the bank of a swamp. And then returns a week or two before hatching and hangs out with them. And does she need to dig them out to where they need to be in the water or whatever. But most of the nests that I approach that have hatched, that doesn't happen. The eggs just hatch and the hatchlings just sort of move around and wriggle themselves to the top.

And how long are they when they come out? Six inches. Okay. Seven inches. But they do make a lot of sounds. So alligator hatchlings in the egg when they're ready to hatch will kind of make this little chirp noise. Like, meow, meow, meow. Oh, you hear the eggs doing that?

Yeah. And that signals hatching to occur theoretically in the other eggs around that egg. And it calls in possums and jinn. And also theoretically, yeah, but it also helps mom know that it's time to come over. Oh. Really? Yeah. I mean, that's the nice anthropomorphized story.

I make that noise. I was talking to a guy that they're hunting gators down in Florida, and they use that sound, like if they're looking for a big gator, they'll make that sound to get that thing to show itself. I do it all the time. It works. It works pretty well.

Giannis' next calling. Yeah, do a gator way off. Do a way off baby gator. You said two and a half degrees Celsius? Yeah. Chris, that's four and a half degrees Fahrenheit. Wow, so not as much as I thought.

You can really feel it though. Yeah. It's hotter. Wait, what? Two degrees Celsius is four degrees Fahrenheit? No, like the difference. So if something is two and a half degrees Celsius more, then it would be 4.5 Fahrenheit. When she comes back to hang out with them, what is she actually doing?

I mean, do the little baby gators come out? Let's say 20 of them come crawling out of the mud. Yeah. They don't imprint on her like i mean does she is she able to sort of manipulate the group and orchestrate and be like i'll show y'all how to catch shrimp like do you know i mean like what is she really doing or she just keeping predators away from the general vicinity yeah i think most of her role at that time is trying to not let herons and raccoons and large stuff eat them. Okay.

So she's a presence. She's a, exactly. She's there to say, don't come eat my hatchlings kind of thing. But there's, I mean, there are some, some crocodilians that are, you know, really incredible from a parental aspect, like the male gharial in India will essentially let all the hatchlings ride on its back for quite a long time after hatching. I would say that of all the vertebrates that I've

ever learned about, my favorite parents are crocodilians. I'm also biased. But take that for what it's worth. Is there a fair bit of cannibalism that goes on? Oh, yeah. At larger sizes. I mean, I remember going out,

collecting samples in Louisiana and seeing an eight-foot alligator with a four-foot alligator hanging out of its mouth. But not so much the little babies. Yeah, I mean, if you're a male alligator and you hear that sound, you're going to come meet those babies.

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

That, yeah. That's my understanding. There's no paternal investment really in the clutch. And they'll mow, they'll mow those little babies down. They'll eat them up. Yeah. Huh. Yeah.

And that's probably, I mean, I, I would say that's true for most crocodilian species where the paternal aspect is effectively irrelevant after fertilization. Bill, when they're real little like that, six inches long, what are they trying to feed on? Bugs and stuff, little bugs. I mean, for a long time, they probably don't even eat. You know, they come out with a yolk sac that's hanging behind them that's not fully shut yet. Oh, really? So in the egg, they've got this yolk sack on their belly.

And when they hatch out, there's essentially a, I mean, you can see it still there. And then eventually the yolk will get absorbed and the skin will heal around it. So they're sustaining on that for a good while. I don't really think I, I don't know how long, but a little while before they start getting their swimming legs under them and can go eat bugs and little fish and stuff like that. But they hang by the nest for a couple of weeks, you know. They'll hang around by it. They'll hang around. Yeah. What are your theories on, in South Florida, what are your theories on what's happening with the dynamic between the pythons and gators?

Like you hear these crazy cases where like a python grabs a gator and it swallows it and the gator fights his way back out of its gut. Yeah. Is there anything substantial going on here between is it like a new great food source is it negligible impact yeah i mean i think there's a lot better people to ask than me who work on crocodilians in south florida about that particular topic but for me not knowing much you know in that area i would say that it's kind of a negligible thing. I mean, yeah, you get these interesting stories of large pythons that have killed and are eating a smaller alligator. And you see potentially alligators with a snake in their mouth. But I think you just sort of introduce one more organism to the assemblage there that gets eaten or is eaten, you know, is eaten or eats can

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

drew a sort of hypothetical line. You mean how far north? Sorry. Yeah. They're trying to be like, okay, in the future, how, like at what point will, what will be the climate restriction? Sure. And they drew a rough line. Maybe it went through like, I can't remember if it reached South Carolina or not, where feasibly they could like reliably survive the winter.

Yeah. Um, what prevents gate like why why can't we have alligators in the great lakes it's too cold that's it yeah i mean that's obvious but that that that is what it is because it would do the cold would do what the cold would metabolically shut them down to a state in which the, when the temperatures were adequate in the summer, they would have, they wouldn't be able to harvest enough resources to survive the extended period that's below their critical thermal minimum. So there's a realized niche and a fundamental niche. Realize niches, what aspects of your environment do you commonly see or are exposed to?

A fundamental niche is what aspects of this n-dimensional hypervolume of environment will kill you or not. And the thermal regime of somewhere that far north is outside of the fundamental niche of an American alligator. So it's a length of exposure thing, correct? Yeah. Because you see them. With their nose up in North Carolina. Yeah. Yeah, and the ice and that kind of stuff.

Yeah. But they can't sustain that for, I six months of the year right feels like up here you know it'd be cool though i wish they were in the great lakes yeah if you what's crazy if you think um you imagine a grizzly on the north slope you know grizzly in a lot of places they're black bears in a lot of parts of their range, they're spending more months underground than they are up. Yeah. Up and about. They're spending more months not. Not foraging.

Yeah. Spending more months not foraging than foraging. Yeah. Well, that would become bad news for a gator. Yeah. I mean, aside from just the temperature being so cold that it kills them. Oh, gotcha. You know.

And then. Well, how long can they make it between meals? Yeah, I mean, I think that crocodilians can survive in theory months without a meal from a sort of low metabolic standpoint, right? We talked about the animals estivating in Costa Rica. That's two, three months without literally no chance to eat. Right. So metabolically, since they're sort of low profile on that, they can go a long, long time without eating. But when they do, they utilize it relatively efficiently from a cellular perspective i had a guy that

guides on okachobe um captain bob stafford guides gator hunts on okachobe and he says when he's guiding a client okay who wants a trophy gator he says a trophy gator? He says a trophy gator is 10 feet. That in his mind is like trophy gator land. Okay. So when he has like a client that really wants a big gator, they're looking for a 10 plus gator. How old is that? Yeah. That's a hard question because growth rates are directly correlated to the thermal environment and resource acquisition for that animal.

So I'll give you an example. I know of a 75-year-old wild alligator in Okefenokee Swamp. He's alive right now. Well, was in 2007. Okay. And it was 75 at the time. And that animal's about 12 feet long. 75 years old and he's 12 feet long.

So I don't, maybe a little bigger. But I don't know that you can draw, you know, a clear straight line between age and length. Got it. But I would imagine. Because you could have one that's 12 feet and 60 years old. Right. Or you could have one that's 14 feet and 75 years old. Right.

A male. Yeah. At that size. But I'll tell you in Costa Rica, you know, we would mark hatchlings in hopes of finding them again. In the next year. So we mark a hatchling that's also about, you

know, six or seven inches long. We found one the next year, 22 kilometers away from where we marked it. That was over a meter long. That is fast. So what the heck is going on there that thing grew incredibly fast he went from six inches to roughly mid 36 feet yeah to three and a half in a year really yeah which i was blown away by we found that someone i feel like someone moved your tag well it's impossible it's a scoot that's removed from the back, so they all get an individual ID number.

But that makes me say, you know, I've always thought that, you know, in general, a crocodilian will grow up like a foot a year if you're an alligator, which makes a nine-foot-long animal, you know, nine years older or a little older. But that really changed my perspective on stuff. Like when you see a three meter animal in Costa Rica, do we really think that that's only three or four years old potentially? Like there needs to be a lot more investigation done on that. What's the oldest you've heard about?

For the American alligator? For the American alligator, 75 for Milky Finoki So that as far as you know That's top endish In the wild That's the top end that I've heard of I wouldn't be surprised If they live 80 years

You know for a statistical outlier But I would say 45 to 60 years If you make it past that initial small stage You got a good shot Older for crocs or? Hard to say. Okay.

Hard to say, especially if we're talking about that potentially super fast young rate of growth in Costa Rica. How old are those monsters out there? Are they only 15 or 20? I mean, I don't know. I don't think we know. I bet Australia has really good data on that for saltwater crocodiles. Because they're dying. And when they get to the end of their lifespan, just like us, they age out.

They die. They get weak. You can't. I found a dead croc sitting on the bank. I was actually on a tour in Costa Rica, helping with a tour. And there was a crocodile on the bank. And I said, let's go over and see that thing. And we approached it and it was just dead.

No idea why. Just got old and died there. You said, boys, I'm going to climb on that bank and die. A peaceful place. Yeah. I mean, I've never seen anything like that before. Yeah. And this thing was probably three and a half meters long.

So like 12, 13 feet. So what is, what is, what do you call an adult alligator? How do you define an adult alligator? Like I would say an adult wild turkey. Yeah. Let's call it Tom. There's two. Bull.

Yeah. Yeah. Let's call it Tom. There's two. Bull. Yeah. Yeah, we use that term. But at what age would you say, like, that's a mature adult? Yeah, so when they, I would use the word adult when they're obviously of reproductive status. And give me a rough ballpark. For a male, seven, eight feet. For a female, six feet plus.

Okay. Once he gets to that size, is what's going to kill him, is that going to be a human? Or another alligator. Okay. Bigger alligator. But yeah, humans or ecotoxins or another bigger bull alligator what's the uh male female like max size difference yeah males get get larger than female and that's like across the board with crocodilians or yeah pretty much yeah um but i called sexual dimorphism. Good phrase. Good. Yeah. Nice job. She learned that listening to the media.

Trivia. I did. Trivia. Yeah. I mean, an adult male can, you know, pretty easily reach 10, 12, 14 feet. I think the biggest female I've ever caught was, you know, nine and a half feet. And that's a, that's a big female. Got it.

So when people are like, when in the case, these guys hunting trophy gators, they're hunting, those are males. Yeah. They're hunting big bull males in usually open water. Is there any visual, like if you were looking at a pile of crocodiles, could you, let's say they're all roughly the same size. Could you pick out the males and the females? Any way to do that? Is there like a physical attribute, you know know that becomes pronounced at a certain year i had a student that was interested in that question and utilized a tool called geometric morphometrics which is a shape

quantification a lot of morphs yeah geometric morphometrics it's a shape quantification tool where he took photos of heads of males and photos of heads of females and sort of allowed the software to see if there were any subtle differences. And there are. I don't remember what they were because we haven't published those data yet. But I think that I have a little instinct to say that's a male and that's a female but to be able to describe you like those dudes who can sex chickens like they can't explain what they're doing when they do it yeah i mean and i think a lot of alligator biologists might have that you know when you look at that and say that's a male but there's no clear thing for the average person to be like that's a male. But there's no clear thing for the average person to be like, that's a.

No. And I don't even think it's clear to us. Like when I'm doing it, I say 70% of my mind, that's a male. Yeah. But am I, am I right? That's like black bear hunters. Well, a range of black bears where it's like, they're of a size that you're like, I don't know. Could be.

You know. But now and then. Well, Yanni was telling me the the other day when you see a mountain lion with the big forehead wrinkles explain that the ones that look real angry well yeah they got the fat rolls on their forehead that's no it's actually a vertical crease oh it's a vertical crease okay i remember talking about that it looks like darker than the rest of the head. When you see that vertical crease, you're looking at a big male. Or so they say. Yeah. Boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join.

Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now, you guys in the Great White North can be part of it.

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to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Do you ever eat alligators, or are they not appetizing to you?

Oh, they're great. Yeah. How many times a year do you eat alligators? Well, maybe three. I make an alligator sauce pecan, an old Louisiana recipe that is just dynamite. Okay. It's a tomato-based, roux-based sort of soupy stew.

Yeah. And it's hot. It's spicy. And put my alligator meat in there. Oh, man. So I know you're a fisherman. Have you ever hunted gators? Or do you just get your meat somewhere else?

I just buy it from the sustainably harvested meat that's sold you never put in for gator permits or nothing no let's say i handed you a gator tag right now would you be like sweet would you be like no i'm not going to go out in the wild and harvest an alligator myself i catch them all the time for for the stuff that i do for my job. Just not. You don't have that. You don't have that. It's just not burning. I just love them. I love them too much.

When you guys are catching them to do whatever research on an individual animal you want to do, how are you getting them? Are you putting baited hooks out? No. No? That'll hurt the thing. As a physiological ecologist, I need that thing to last a lot longer than after it deals with me. Right. So we can catch them by hand if they're small.

We can catch them by a snare on a, on a pole. So we literally take like a. Just dangle it over them. Like a snare that makes like a lasso with a tree lock mechanism. Sure. On it. And I electrical tape it to a cane pole and I'm on in a boat on the front of the boat and I try to put that that open well open part of the snare over its neck and yank it shut

and then as soon as I get it on my boat I open the snare get it off of them so you're not setting snares for them no no man when I was just in Florida, we were talking about there's a coni bears. It's a body gripping trap. Okay. 110, 220, 330. And then they've started to fill it in like 160. Anyways, me and Seth were talking about getting some 880s. Because we found some pinch points for gators

that have been dynamite, man. 880 coni bears setting that little, where these channels would neck down to it, you'd be getting gators non-stop Like do you guys ever capture like Real big ones and how would you So how are you doing that Same way? Wrestling

Yeah we'd use a snare So you guys don't set like some kind of trap That that thing would like enter I've set traps for alligators before but that's because I need Specific individuals Like the mom that Laid that's because I need specific individuals, like the mom that laid that nest. So I set the net, the, the trap at a nest site. What kind of trap?

I want only those, that individual gator. It's essentially a two by four, eight foot by three foot box that I wrap in chain link and has like a, a piece of fence in the front where they go in the back and get a bait, not off a hook, but just off a thing. And it pulls a pin in the door. And then I get them the next morning and work them up and get them out. That's gotta be a hefty contraption. I've built probably four of them. Most of them burn up in marsh fires, to be honest. But during my master's, I had really good success with those traps. But how long is that trap?

Like how long is, it's about eight feet long. And you set it on the ground? Set it on the ground. So he's coming out of the water to come up. Right. Well, like the front lip of it is at the water's edge. And what are you baiting it with? Chicken.

Really? Stuff like that. Yeah. People do that. I've had. Are they madder than hell when you come up on them? Yes. Oh my gosh. They do? Oh my gosh. Yeah. They're that. Are they madder than hell when you come up on them? Yes. Oh, my gosh.

They do? Oh, my gosh. Yeah, they're tearing everything apart. They don't like it. But then you have to somehow get in the trap with it to work it up, and that's always problematic. What's the biggest gator you can wrassle? I asked this to a guy the other day.

This guy's name begins with alligator, okay, as do many people down there, I realize. Yeah. I said, what's the biggest gator you can wrestle? He said he can wrestle a 10-foot gator. I'm like, how could that be true? The biggest alligator I've ever caught was 10 feet 6 inches. Oh, so

really? Yeah. By yourself, you're saying. But it weighs so much more than you do, though. Yeah, I mean, it's all just rules. I mean, I know a guy who wrestles alligators better than anybody, and he's 140 pounds soaking wet. Okay, walk me through it. Here he is. There's a gator. 10-foot gator.

There's a gator in the water. Let's say he's in the water and I'm on a boat with a headlamp. And I see the eye shot. In the water. How deep is the water? Six feet. Really? Eight feet. I thought they had to be on a bank. But now it depends. Is there visibility in the water or not?

Is there visibility? Gin clear. Oh, well, then it's cake. I win every time. Okay, like a chocolate shake. Well, then the gator wins almost every time. It's got to be on the top and get the snare on. Like pretty good visibility.

Yeah. Not gin clear, but pretty good. Six feet of water, 10 foot gator. So usually we like approach it pretty slow, shut the motor off in a mud boat or something like that, and try to get close enough with angling the beam of the headlamp just off of the head so that the eye is still in sort of that peripheral light that's emitted,

but it doesn't think that you're looking directly at it. Yep. These are secrets that I really shouldn't be sharing. Trade secrets. Trade secrets. Yeah, Mignone can be down there wrassling. He'll be down there doing it. And then try to get near enough to put that snare around its head.

No, I'm talking about wrassling it. Well, that's the first step. Then you bring it over to the bow. Because you can wrassle them without a snare. You just mean in the water. Steve's talking like you go to the circus and see a guy wrassling a gator. Yeah. I mean, there are tons of people who do that really well in captive environments in South Florida.

I mean, there's folks that will snorkel. So that's not a thing you do? No. Okay. I want to hear what you do, but I thought there's this thing where you grab the gator by the tail. He goes left. You manipulate his tail. Oh, yeah.

I mean, you can do that stuff if you're in an enclosure. I don't do that. In wild populations, you can't just walk up to an alligator and reliably catch it. I mean, I'm sure it's happened. There are people that are really good at this, better than me. But that's not like, if you're going to better than me but but that's not like if you're gonna go get one tonight that's not your plan no because usually i need to get a hundred in a month or something like that so wasting that time plus the wrestling yeah plus it's unsafe and

would be um you'd be viewed poorly by my employer we had a uh we're friends with this guy who's a uh turkey biologist. And he was telling us a story about an unkillable gobbler. Is there like old gators that are like uncatchable? Like they hear the boat and they're just gone. You know about the new unkillable gobbler? Because someone killed the unkillable gobbler. In a tree? No, but the new unkillable gobbler. Tell me, honey.

He said that they think they got a gobbler that as you're calling him in, he gets to a certain distance and then flies up into the trees. That's the one I'm talking about. To look around. That's the one I'm talking about. And then like hops from

tree to tree. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we talked about that. Yeah, I must have told you about it after I seen him. Because I can imagine there's got to be some old ass gators that are just ghosts. They're like, he's not going to get me. That's what that guy in Okeechobee. I said, are there gators out here that can live their whole life and not get killed? And he said, they get smart, man. Yeah.

He goes, they get like hunting a wary whitetail. Yeah, you get to be 50 years old and. He said, they know, like they don't, they don't make big mistakes. Yeah. They, they, they'll like hole up in thick shit. You don't just catch them out dicking around. Yeah. Like they get cautious.

Cause he's looking for, they're looking for gators in like certain situations. Are they cracking them with rifles or how are they getting them? No, he takes Cornish game hens, fills them with filofone. So they crack sealer. You can't use a hook. So they use a wooden dowel sharpened on each end. And you bury that in the cornish game hen and what they do is they find the gator they want watch it and he gets to a spot where he feels

like he can approach it and it's in its instinct isn't going to be to run away but he can approach it where its instinct is going to be go down lay on the bottom so they'll watch with binos they hunt the daytime and he'll get to be like okay we can approach it now and its response will be to hide and not book they go to it and they know right where it is and he says he sets that bait right where he knows that when he comes up he's gonna find the bait opens the bail on his fishing rod and goes and gets a couple hundred yards away and waits he says eventually it's going to come up if you did your job right and he goes you got to put it up current or upwind when he comes up he's going to be like oh shit a cornish game hen

and go eat it and he said you'll watch and you'll know when he ate it good is his tail and his head come up. Because he's trying to choke it down. He goes, because sometimes they'll carry it. Yeah. And if you pull, he's just going to drop it. But you wait until, and if you get, if you're too close to him, he's never going to eat it. He said, if he knows you're there, he's going to grab it and leave.

If he thinks he's cool, you watch and you'll know that he swallowed it. At which point he closes the bale and tightens up on it. leave if he thinks he's cool you watch you'll know that he swallowed it at which point he closes the bail and tightens up on it and first takes up all the braid and gets it to like a cable leader and then they just start fucking wrassling it on the end of that cable you shoot it in the head with a pistol eventually use a um eventually these a bank's yeah yeah no get another hook into it. Yep. You can use a hook, but you can't bait it.

So then they'll get a snagging hook. Oh, like a big treble hook. Then they'll get a snagging hook into it. And then they get it up. Because everybody's got a job. Everybody on the boat does this, you do that, you do this, and eventually they bang stick it. Okay, so you approach your gator. Yeah.

With a snare. With a snare. With a snare. But aren't there a lot of them that just aren't going to never let you approach it? Yeah, it's tough. Okay, there are some. Yep. I mean, back to your point, I mean, there are some folks in Costa Rica who talk about seven meter size animals in the Tempe River.

Mm-hmm. And I mean, those are gigantic animals. There are some folks in Costa Rica who talk about seven meter size animals in the Tempe River. And I mean, those are gigantic animals. And the reason they get that big is because nobody can ever get a hold of them. Right. So I, there are animals out there that are sort of iconically large that you see, you know, once a decade. But that's, I i mean that's obviously really hard and anus live undetected or uncatchable undetected yeah me and my buddy were standing on the bank of a boat dock in costa rica once and we saw a head off in the distance in the river

that looked to be like five feet long just the head the head. The head. Just the head. I mean, obviously me, I want that to be this massive thing. But man, never seen a head that big. Never saw it again. You didn't go rassle it. Couldn't rassle it. It would lose.

It would fit inside the mouth. It would lose 100% of the time. For the head thing, I don't know if this applies to crocodiles, but isn't it for alligators, you can estimate their length by the width of their, like their length of feet correlates to the

width and inches of their head or something like that. Yeah. There's that, there's a sort of crude anecdotal metric of the distance from the nares to the eyes in inches is roughly how long the animal is in feet. But I mean, I think that's relatively reliable.

Yeah. So you approach them in the boat. Approach them in the boat. You got your snare. You come in behind them. Any, any which way they'll let me approach. Okay. I mean, most of the time they'll just run or go under, swim away and they'll reappear you know 30 yards to your left

okay you do the whole whole thing again start the boat up move over to them if you can get within 12 feet or so is is the cane pole length then great great. You know what I mean? Oftentimes I try to put the snare on and miss and do it again. But what if he just goes into some real thick shit and you can't go in there after him? Oh, if they go on land, then they're mine. If they go up in the vegetation, I can work my way up in there and put the snare on them.

But it's when they go down, then I have no idea when they're coming up. I mean, I'll chase chase an hour i've learned now to just not like in open waters in mobile bay where we're doing research i could you could be after the same alligator for eight hours and never catch it so after like three tries i move on to greener pastures like you're not going to get them i'm yeah i give up on them and when you put the snare around it where are you trying to put it? Around its neck. Okay, so you place it with that pole.

Place it with the pole. And then you hand line them. Yank it shut, bring them in, or if they're too big to be in the boat, move the boat onto shore and move the animal up onto shore. And what's his attitude about this whole thing? He's pissed. They're not happy.

I wouldn't be happy. And you get them up on shore, and then how do you eventually get control of them? Cover their eyes, usually with something, if they're really angry, and then one person holds the rope, the other person hops on, shuts their mouth,

use gator tape, a.k.a. electrical tape, tape their mouth shut. Not even duct tape. Take the snare off. Just electrical tape. Tape their mouth shut. Not even duct tape. Take the snare off. Just electrical tape. Yeah, electrical tape's fine. Couple wraps. Tape his mouth shut.

Tape his mouth shut. Get the snare off as soon as you can. Process the animal. So as powerful as that jaw is, It closes really hard. But when it's closed, you get it open. A little bit of resistance is going to keep it from doing that. Yeah.

Yeah. There are big animals in Costa Rica that we've caught. I think the biggest crocodilian we've ever caught was a little over 16 feet. Those are difficult animals to move. Takes a whole team of six or eight of us to move them. Well, sometimes less. But the hard part is getting the mouth shut enough to actually put electrical tape on it because the top of the jaw to the bottom of the jaw of an animal that size is like a foot tall. So I'm using all my strength in my arms just to get the mouth shut and hopefully somebody runs over and tapes the mouth real quick have you ever gotten nipped or got your hand in there on accident or seen that happen man go ahead and knock on wood right now no battle scars whatsoever i have uh never been seriously injured by a crocodilian. Thank goodness.

Knock again. Have you ever seen anyone get nipped or got their hand stuck in there? Yeah. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. That seems like a good way to get an infection. Yeah, for sure.

I imagine you've got to watch out for that tail, too, huh? Yeah, people say that. Really? But it's not a... Yeah, I mean, it hurts if it hits you. I mean, on a really big animal, it can knock you off your feet, but... It's not going to snap your leg in half. No. People say that, but that's not a yeah i mean it hurts if it hits you i mean on a really big animal it can knock you off your feet but it's not going to snap your leg in half no people say that but that's just hype so i'm gonna ask you he can't hurt you with any other body part other than that jaw really like you can't i mean the whole process is painful for me especially like in costa rica so usually i jump first on the head and then this 250 pound former football player jumps on behind me and mashes me down onto the animal.

That hurts more than anything else. That hurts a lot. But at my age, I try to do that as little as possible now. And it's his instinct when you're messing with them. It's instinct is to bite you. No, it's instinct is to get out of the situation that I rudely put it in. Yeah.

You know, I, in this, in this whole scenario. But I mean, he'll, he'll deliberately snap at you or no. Yeah. Okay. If he can. Yeah. Got it.

So it's on its mind to defend itself by snap and not just to get away. Yeah. Yeah. And, and he means necessary to get off of it. I mean, when you have a rope around your neck, you can't get away. Your last resort is to just not get killed. And that's what probably it thinks is going to happen.

Yeah. Can we get into their immune system a bit? Because you were telling me how interesting, how robust the immune system is. I know we don't have too much time left. The innate immune system. This is some really interesting work done. Adam McNeese, a colleague of mine, can I say his name? Oh, yeah.

Mark Merchant. He's a phenomenal biochemist who studies alligators. And his work has shown that, so he essentially wanted to say, how strong is alligator blood at killing stuff. And he threw like every kind of fungal pathogen at it, a ton of viruses, any bacteria, like 23 bacteria, and it killed them all. Their innate immune system is just so robust at killing pathogens.

It's blood? You're saying that it put bacteria and viruses in alligator blood? Yeah, they take blood from the alligator and have super controlled assays in which they do this stuff. You put blood in a little plate, tube in a plate

and then put other stuff, bad stuff in there and you can measure how much of the bad stuff was killed. They also do this like zone of inhibition style metric where they, they grow a bacteria on a plate and then they put a drop of alligator blood plasma in the center and then measure the diameter of bacteria that is no longer on that plate because it was killed. And they are so good at killing stuff.

So people are probably interested in this whole deal from a biomedical. Exactly. Yeah. You know, I'll say this now because it's a good segue. Alligators are great model organisms for human health from an immune perspective, from an ecotoxicological perspective, from an endocrine perspective. I mean, they, they should be more highly regarded in that capacity and are starting to be. What, um, but, but they're, they're, they're not sensitive to ecotoxins. Oh, they are. They are.

Cause I know like, like frogs are horrifically sensitive, right? I mean. Yeah. I would say, so there's this, there are these things called endocrine disrupting contaminants or endocrine disrupting compounds. And one of the biggest case studies used

alligators in Florida out of the Lou Gillette Lab and continued Lou Gillette Lab lineage. They looked at how synthetically produced contaminants in a lake actually bias the sexual differentiation of hatchling alligators and subsequent age classes so like if you expose an alligator to a compound that mimics estrogen or antagonizes estrogen or antagonizes androgen so like all like birth control stuff and the water supply and everything. Yeah. But those receptors are pretty good. Well, the things we make are really good at binding to those receptors or antagonizing them. And the first real case study on environmental estrogens was done in Lake Apopka in central Florida. And, I mean, you talk about peregrine falcons and cormorants and all that type of stuff. I would say, you know, the biggest case study

that sort of taught the world about the power of endocrine-disrupting contaminants was on alligators. Really? And that study system is still producing tons of really interesting information. Tons. Like that stuff is damaging. Oh yeah.

So in that scenario, most of the toxins, if memory serves, were environmentally estrogenic, probably anti-androgenic. So when you're exposing mom to these compounds through- But what are these compounds being used by people? No, mostly like organic chlorine, pesticide use, usually pesticide use. I'm sorry. I thought you were saying that you hear about hormones in drinking water from various human various human treatments right hormones i thought you meant that that's what's happening no no no yeah so so those are really good it's the same thing so these biotoxins are these biotoxins are influencing the hormones in gators not that we're

putting hormones in the water that's affecting gators right they're they're mimicking endogenous hormones hormones that naturally exist within the body or at least binding to their receptors. Okay. And that, because these things are, have temperature dependent sex determination, all that really means is the temperature creates a genetic cascade that turns on one enzyme or turns on a different enzyme. And that's where those enzymes take a maternally supplied hormone pool

and say this is all going to become estrogen or this is all going to become androgen like testosterone. And when you bias that maternally supplied steroid pool with something that looks like estrogen or looks like an androgen, all of a sudden the signals become a little washy. And you're able to produce, in that case, feminized male alligators or super female alligators in which you see things like polynuclear oocytes, more than one nuclei per egg, or poly at it under a microscope, you'll see seminiferous tubules, which are the portions of the gonad that make sperm. And then right next to those, you may see an egg. And you're like, what the heck is going on here?

Must be an endocrine disrupting contaminant better apply for a grant man to what degree is that going i mean i guess that's the question ultimately people are going to want to know is to what degree is that going on with humans yeah i mean i teach an ecotoxicology class at the master's level at Southeastern, and a lot of the literature that we read tends to focus on how potentially volatile these things are, so in the North Pole have super high amounts of PCBs, a synthetic thing that they would never have otherwise been exposed to aside from them being in the air. So, I mean, if we're talking about humans, yeah, we're exposed to a lot of stuff all the time. Um, red meat in farm steak has dioxins in it to a higher degree than almost anything else that you

eat. I'm really throwing stuff under the bus here, but I mean- Maybe we should drink alligator blood and be perfect. Well, that doesn't fight off those EDCs. It doesn't fight synthetics. Just bacteria. Yeah. But I mean, yeah, I think that the use of alligators to teach us about how these ecotoxins may or may not be affecting humans is a super viable pathway for research and is and continues to be. Man, you got me thinking about that gator blood. What's the...

What was it that... You remember one early in the pandemic? Python oil? No. in the pandemic um python oil no what president trump mused about has anyone looked into that you would drink bleach no no it caused like a big yeah it caused a big shit storm in the news the horse tea wormer i can't no it wasn't okay no no no what no there was like a there was a press conference and someone mentioned that there was some impact of something and there was like a wondering if if like somehow there was a way to sort of metabolize this substance either way it's got me wondering about uh you know you can see a sci-fi movie right where people were wanting to

consume gator blood well there's a lot of i mean they're harvesting they're harvesting hide and meat they could start like a whole supplement thing with the blood you know one of the worst movies ever made um one of my favorite actors worst movies was called the hunter not dare soon to foe yeah not dare suzala one of the greatest movies ever made last uh he was hunting for the biomedical the biomedical evil people wanted their hands on the last thera what's the what's a uh a tasmanian tiger is a theracine they got some name it's a lazarus species where people are always like that it saw one but maybe it didn't actually go extinct the evil like if there's a movie and there's biomedical people in

it those people will be bad oh for sure i can promise you generally the hunters are bad too and the oil big oil disney movies when they gotta set up a conflict it's the oil people but uh biomed you're gonna be bad never be cast in a movie if you're a biomed person they want the last there's is it there seen it's not a tessie people senior it's not a Tasmanian devil it's something bigger than Tasmanian tiger yeah some there's a tiger bring that or Tasmania wolf maybe Willem Dafoe. They catch word that there's one left. And Willem Dafoe is like a hunter slash mercenary.

And he takes off with some, he has a magical backpack. He heads into the Tasmanian outback with a little backpack, but keeps producing amazing things from this little backpack. There's like also like side love story going on of course yeah um it's a good movie he's got a little pack but also he's got like a shitload of giant traps and a big ass gun he needs to go kill this theracine for the evil biomed people this evil tasmanian tiger which is a mart is the cool animals the marsupial like a like a marsupial predator and uh and yeah and he gets kind of burned out on the evil biomedical people shoots it anyway which really surprised me shoots it anyway and then burns it up he's like

in the end it's kind of like by God no one's gonna have it right it's a weird way to handle it yeah shoots the last one and burns it up being like they're not gonna have it no one's gonna have it damn it what was i talking about this far yeah i'm trying to think how you're gonna i know what alligator blood they wanted that thing's blood to cure sicknesses or to make sicknesses they're gonna do something with it so now you know i'm picturing like this alligator blood having some kind of that's i mean that ultimately has to be the the idea what that like that would be where your big time funding comes from is that if they have this ability to fight off all these infections then um that would be a biomedical interest and i imagine if they have this demonstrable if if synthetic substances in the environment in the form of pollution

have this demonstrable effect on their hormone development and reproduction, that probably becomes of great interest to medical researchers. Absolutely, yeah. I would, as a disclaimer, say do not go try to get alligator blood for any purpose ever. Thank you. But, yeah, I think you're absolutely right, and I think there's a lot of work that's beginning to use alligators as model organisms

for human health, and that's a great thing. What's the state of the gator in the U.S.? How are they? They're doing great. I'll handle that one. Okay. Shitloads. Is there any... So there's no places where there's like, man, things aren't going well here. They're like generally doing very well. Yeah, I mean, throughout the any, like, so there's no places where there's like, man, things aren't going well here.

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

You're like, uh, how's it going guys? You been seeing any? Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm not, it's, it's the, it's the regulations and the promotion of them being used as a sustainable resource that ultimately brought them back from extinction so if it's managed well and effectively and seems to be very well throughout the southeast

u.s then then that's fine have fun i know stay within the laws you don't wear gator skin boots i don't you don't have big gator teeth necklaces i don't i. I'm a biologist. You guys can't do that. I'm a nerd. But you can't become like a guy with a gator hat and gator boots. I could. Do you got a gator skull on your desk at work? No, they're in the lab. All for teaching.

I want one of those skulls bad. How many gators have you handled? Oh, can you send us a big, huge gator skull? I mean a big one. Maybe. There's some laws that require the transport of alligator materials across state lines. They're a CITES animal? CITES animal, yeah, for sure. Oh, they are.

So, but they just need to be, because we're hunting, some of us meteor folks are hunting in September. So, but you are allowed to transport them, but you need to fill out all the proper paperwork and all of that. But won't you just ask the question? Somebody just asked a question. Are you going to send me a big old huge baguette? We can try. Oh, how many gators have you had? This is my last question.

How many gators have I handled? How many gators have you touched? Wild gators. Wild alligators. Crocodilians or whatever, you know. Oh, in total? In total. Well, we've caught 1,500 American crocodiles in Guanacaste that are marked.

So probably add 500 or so onto that that aren't marked. And for alligators, I would say maybe 3,000 or 4,000. Damn. I don't know, a lot. It is my job. Are those crocs in Costa Rica protected? Are they a species that are used? No, they're not harvested.

And that's sort of a different great story in the sense that they're used profitably for ecotourism. So the management of those populations is also a renewable resource, but in a different sort of vein. I don't got any more questions. Okay. Is there anything we missed? That you're like, these guys really

need to know about this, about crocs. I want to return to my first question. Oh, heart chamber. Oh, what's that? Like why they can stand up. Well, yeah, and that was right in the same paragraph as talking about how long they can hold their breath, which I think

everybody at home is dying to know that. How long can they hold their breath? He's going to give us some wishy-washy science answers. Seven hours. I think that's an imperative. I thought he was going to be like, well, it depends on the gator. Well, that's all true. That's all true, but no one wants

to hear that. They want to hear a number. How long? Seven hours, I think, has been recorded in the past. That is crazy. Yeah. But they do that by circulating blood through the systemic circuit and bypassing the lungs. They don't actually have a fifth chamber, but they have a foramen of poniesa, it's called,

which bypasses the lungs so they can recirculate blood throughout the body, maximizing the exchange of oxygen to cells. I want one of those. Yeah. Seven hours. I think that's a number that has been recorded. But if I were to give you a real answer. You could do some real spearfishing.

Oh my God, the spearfishing implications. You just go down an ambush hunt. I don't know, later in seven hours, something cool is going to come out. Set up a blind down there. Somebody needs to try to create an external pack of that that you, you know, instead of

an oxygen tank. No, instead of that. Instead of that. This would be cool. It doesn instead of that. Instead of that. This would be cooler. It doesn't bubble. So they got that. Seven hours underwater. Oh, here's my last question. I'm going back

to my first question. You know those little stock tanks I was talking about that have them living in it? Yeah. Let's say the rainy season never came. Mm-hmm.

Okay. The water never came. He could feasibly live in that little hole the size of this studio. How long? Long time. Years. Okay. Years water never came. He could feasibly live in that little hole the size of this studio. How long? Long time, years. Okay. Years, I think.

So he's not like, holy cow, it's getting close. If the water doesn't rise, I'm doomed. Like he could survive a dry season. I think that if a prey item, and in that scenario, it's likely to happen, waterfowl or some animal that needs water approaches that watering hole and they're successfully eating every six months something kind of big that they can probably live for years and really metabolically they're just so efficient but let's say that thing

that let's say his little hole dries up then i think that steve's question is that but the he only needs the water because it attracts prey. Does the gator need water to survive? It's interesting. We like to think that all crocodilians need water to survive. But during the

dry season in Costa Rica, you see them walking in the woods. That's what I was going to ask. Way far away from any water. Like how many miles. What are they doing there? We've seen him like five kilometers from the nearest water body or more. What the heck are they doing?

Presumably he's heading out looking for a new water hole. It's like that lost penguin. The problem, well, I don't know, like intuitively going up a limestone mountain escarpment would not be where you'd go to find water. Got it. But yet sometimes you see them up there in the middle of a dense forest. If he's up there, would he eat something if it came in front of him? He tried to eat me.

Oh, really? Well, I'm the jerk again. I caught him. And so we had an aggressive interaction. Caught him up in the woods. Caught him up in the woods. Caught him up in the woods. We were driving back from sampling to where we stay, a station, a little biological station. And on the road, we saw a nine footer.

Really? Yeah. We got out of the car, chased him into the woods, caught him, got our sample. I mean, those are the animals that you really want to put like a. Tracking. A sat tracker on. To find out what he's up to.

What are they up to in the woods up there? I mean, it's crazy, but yeah. If the water hole dries up, I give him less of a chance. But again, you see alligators. But eventually he's going to. Walking all over the place. He'll walk to go find something.

He'll try. Yeah, his hole would dry up, and he would eventually light out. Yeah. He's not just going to be like, oh, I guess I'm doomed. Unlike that one I saw on the bank. He just goes up there and sits down and dies. He would strike out looking for water. Yeah, they'll walk around.

And I think they walk around on land so much more than we give them any credit for. Got it. All right. For real, my last final one. It is, John. If I'm down in Florida with my kids and there's a pond nearby, there's an eight-footer sunning itself,

what's the best way to approach it? How close can you get and be safe? Check it out. Let your kids get a good... Do you love it? You know, worry it a little bit. Yeah, but be safe. Well, the, the safe answer there is a pair of binoculars. That's not the answer you're looking

for. No, no, no, no, no. We're looking for the real. You want to get close. Say now I'm liable here. Uh, I would say that if you stay outside of 50 feet of that thing. Now, assuming that there's not a nest around, because nesting females that are attentive will not want you there. Because they have that variable, varying personalities. Far out of their way to make sure you don't go near that nest.

So, I mean, I would stay as far away as feasibly possible. And don't mess around. If I were you. At the water's edge, right? I would use binoculars and don't mess around at the water's edge. Yeah. Okay.

Stay as far away as you can. That would have a humongous, that would have meant that my childhood hadn't happened. Take the water's edge away. It was spent at the water's edge. That's all we ever did. Yeah. Go down by the lake. See what's going on down there.

Go rasslegate it I'm serious what a huge impact on life we stayed at that house down there and we were what was that river that was flowing by us that we went fishing at anyways there was a dock and some kind of a waterway

and you know it was nice enough where you think gosh we could just go for a swim but you can't go for a swim kind of a waterway. Oh, yeah, the Kissimmee. You know, it was nice enough where you think, gosh, we could just go for a swim. But you can't go for a swim. You can, but you assume a large risk in doing so, right? I mean... Nobody in their right mind is going to let their kids go jumping off the dock.

I'm not going to let my kids go jumping off that dock. Yeah. And when I say 50 feet, I would say 50 feet with a fence between you and the animal. Okay. So follow-up question. How fast can that eight footer move on dry ground? Covered at 50 feet. They can move surprisingly fast if they want you away. I mean, if you approach an alligator on, not me.

Okay. No, I mean, you guys can run away. But if you're approaching that thing, it has explosive energy. And it can move pretty short distances way faster than people give it credit for. Just stay away from it. Go to a zoo. What do you do at the zoo? Look at it. Oh, if you want to get up close.

With a glass pane between you yeah yeah all right so you probably don't want people tracking you down do you want people to get a hold of you and say like here's where you're wrong no they can email us i mean i'm sure they'll chat with you yeah i'll be happy to take follow-up stuff via email and i mean a lot of this stuff we're talking about so interesting but there's not a lot of empirical data published on some of this stuff, you know. So it's all out for exploration, a lot of it. And hence, I have a job. Well, like if someone wanted to read some of your research, where would they go do that and find it?

Oh, they can go to my website. They can go to ResearchGate, which is sort of a nerd repository for all things that you publish. Google Scholar is a phenomenal resource that the public usually doesn't know about, but they can search peer review literature using Google Scholar and help bridge the gap between science and the public. Wonderful resource there. Crocodilian biologist Chris Murray of Southeastern Louisiana University. You can send all of your anecdotal contradictions to what he said today. We've got a new email address. It's just themeateaterpodcast at TheMeatEater.com. Is that live now so we got our own email?

Mm-hmm. Oh, my God. Okay, so when something crazy happens. Incredible. And you find a human skull in the woods, email us, then call 911. Right, exactly. We want all your breaking news. All the weird stuff.

TheMeatEaterPodcast at TheMeatEater.com. Who came up with that? Tired type of thing. Me and Corinne texted about it yesterday, if you really need to know. It could have been podcast, but I was like. No, we have that, but it's so, but no, I don't know. We want our own hotlines for our own hot tips. Yeah.

Hot, and then, but don't, when you want to have anecdotal evidence that contradicts what you heard today from Chris Murray, send it to Southeastern Louisiana University. Say, shit, I killed one that was 80 easy. You can still send that to us. I'll filter it, Chris. Don't you worry. Anything that would begin with shit, send it to us. I'll filter it, Chris. Don't you worry. Anything that would begin with shit, send it to us.

And Steve, how do you feel about a biologist coming in here and giving relatively direct answers and not trying to... He did good.

He got, he did that little wishy-washy deal they do. I can't remember what he was doing it about. Oh, how fast they grow. A little wishy-washy. There's some variation there.

But he brought it home. He brought it home. He brought it home. He wound up coming down with an answer. But it wasn't all like, it depends. What about this? Depends. And this?

Depends. It does depend. But nobody wants to hear that on here, so. What I like asking scientists is when they're doing research, I like asking them, what do they hope happens? Smoke comes out of their ears. what do they hope happens? Smoke comes out of their ears. What do you hope happens? Well, that's the whole point.

I can't hope because I've got to be unbiased. I'm like, but I know you hope something happens. I know you hope it's interesting. Yeah, like, when you put a collar on a lynx, I'd be like, what do you hope happens? And they're supposed to publicly, they'd be like, well, we just want to gather the data. I'd put it on and be like, I hope this thing turns up in some crazy-ass place. But I would never be able to say it.

I'd say, I just want to have an accurate representation. Meanwhile, I'm like, wouldn't it be sweet if some guy in Iowa found this links? You know they're hoping. They're hoping it happens. Alright. Thank you, everybody. Thanks, Chris.

Thank you, everybody. Thanks, Chris. Thank you. Oh, ride on, ride on, let it fly on. I want to see your gray hair shine like silver in the sun Ride on Ride on my love Ride on Sweetheart We're done beat this damn horse to death Take a new one and ride on

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