Learn to live among gators

Your children will grow up around alligators, just as we grew up among wild dogs, venomous snakes and black-widow spiders.

Just as we sensed danger from a snake in the grass, spider in the wood pile, or snarling stray frothing at the mouth, they must learn to sense a sneak attack in the shallows.

This will have to be among the survival tips we teach kids, like fire and “stranger danger”: Don’t talk to strangers; don’t play with fire; don’t swim or wade at night in gator country.

This recap of gator traits is not to blame anyone for an alligator’s killing a 2-year-old in Orlando, because no one’s to blame.

Well, except the alligator, apparently:

“GATOR INVASION!” yelled a TV voice-over Thursday for a celebrity news show promo. “Where will these monsters strike next?”

Somewhere in the Southeast, along the shoreline of a swamp, pond or lake, would be my guess.

The Southeastern alligator has rebounded from its decades-old population death throes, and now spreads across its natural range, well adapted to backwaters where it basks on the banks in the summer.

The hotter the weather, the more active the cold-blooded gator.

Years ago a guy down at Oxbow Meadows dragged a six-footer out of the pond there by its tail, and was crouched behind it when the gator in a flash used the handler’s holding its tail to pivot backward, turning its body into a U-shape, and nearly snagging the guy’s other hand.

The temperature was 95 degrees with high humidity, so we were about as wet as the gator. The handler said he should not have tried that under those conditions.

Though we needn’t fear a monster invasion … well, not of alligators, anyway … the idea that alligators are rare here, or slow, is a myth. They are all around us, in the swamps of Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, and they must be accounted for, and given a safe distance — especially from small animals, and children.

Alligators evolved for stealth, to swim silently, lunge from the shallows and drag prey to death by drowning, once their vise-like jaws snag it. To drag it under, alligators typically need prey that weighs less than they do.

They have sensors on their jaws that by ripples gauge what’s making waves across the water. If it sounds like a small animal splashing around, that draws them.

Their eyes are positioned just above the water’s surface, with a wide side range, and they’re adapted to night vision, as that’s when the prey’s less likely to see them coming.

Alligator attacks on humans are rare. Alligator attacks on small animals at the water’s edge at night in hot weather are not.

They scare hell out of me, because I own dogs that swim. And even if they’re just in the backwater south of the whitewater course, at mid-afternoon, I scan the river, so paranoid I think logs have eyes.

Unlike kids today, I did not grow up around alligators, as far as I knew. Alligators were endangered from over-hunting. So, unlike almost everything else except eagles, you couldn’t just shoot them. They had done been shot, we would have said.

Now they’re back, and you still can’t just shoot them, unless you’re on a permitted, regulated hunt. So you have to learn to be wary of them, like we learned to be wary of strangers, and wild dogs, and snakes and spiders.

They are not going away, and so far, neither are we, though their species has survived far longer than ours.

So far.

This story was originally published June 19, 2016 at 10:01 PM with the headline "Learn to live among gators."