E
arlier this year the St. Augustine Alligator Farm
Zoological Park in north Florida celebrated its
125th birthday. Today, the Alligator Farm is on the
National Register of Historic Places and welcomes
over 200,000 visitors annually. The main attraction
of the afternoon is feeding time, and while locals
and tourists alike begin to congregate around the
glass enclosure overlooking the ‘pit’, dozens of
American Alligators (Alligator mississipiensis) start
their own journey, easing off the banks surrounding
the lagoon and meandering slowly through the
water.
“Gators are ambush predators,” Kiersten Wallace, a
staff member, explains, as she tosses giant gator
‘biscuits’ to the waiting hordes. “Usually all you will
see near the water’s edge are the ears, the eyes
and nostrils. That’s all you can see exposed. Then,
with one big burst, they’ll grab their prey and roll
with it. They can’t chew; alligators can only ‘tear’, so
they clamp down with incredible bite strength and
then they roll.”
Rolling effectively drowns the prey item, and if it is
too large to be consumed in a single meal, main-
taining it beneath the water will allow it to rot, until
piece after piece, chunk after chunk can be ripped
off for a convenient snack. Kiersten sails another
pair of nuggets into the midst of the gators. A mass
of olive-black carnivores is patiently waiting near the
wooden platform where she is divvying out the
rations. “Alligators are also opportunistic, grabbing
food whenever the opportunity might arise, but only
if they are hungry. They spend most of their day
thermoregulating their body temperature, so in
actuality, they don’t require that much food. After a
good meal, they might not eat again for a week.”
When I visited here over 25 years ago, the delicacy
of choice was the Nutria, or Coypu (Myocastor
coypus), a huge rodent native to South America that
is about three times the size of a Muskrat.
Implicated in the destruction of wetlands in the
United States, Coypu were readily harvested in the
nearby swamps. Yet despite the meat being sold
for human consumption in eastern Europe,
according to Gen Anderson, the General Curator
of the Farm, it was found to be deficient in
vitamins A and E, which can affect the fertility of
the alligators. “Plus, we learned that the rodents
were killed with lead bullets. This led to unusually
high concentrations of lead in the alligators’
bodies. We didn’t learn that until later though,
because it takes a long time to show up.”
Now, the alligators are fed a diet of specially-
formulated biscuits made by Mazuri, a global
leader in exotic animal nutrition, notably zoo
species, and a division of Purina. Presently, even
Right: the author catches a ride on a replica
alligator. Image courtesy Vickie Lillo.
visitors can share in the feeding excitement - shove
a quarter into one of the machines and a pellet
slides down a chute. Hungry alligators, using their
excellent hearing to tune in to the clink of that
25-cent piece, often hover nearby, their maws
agape.
The reptiles begin to cluster around Kiersten,
sensing the caretaker has a special treat - their
preferred snack of frozen white rats. She plucks a
good-sized specimen from her bucket and dangles
it by the tail. The pink nose brushes across a couple
of teeth in a gator’s wide-open mouth. “C’mon,” she
jokingly chastises the animal. “You can make more
effort than that!”
Seconds later, the prodigious jaws snap shut and
the rat disappears down its gullet, as the gator
slides back down into the water.
St. Augustine has an impressive collection of
American Alligators, all of which are tracked with
state-of-the-art transponder chips inserted in the
neck, just underneath their nuchal scutes.
Considered an endangered species in the 60s and
70s, today gators are enjoying a resurgence due to
legislation enacted partly through the efforts of the
‘The alligator is a CONSERVATION
SUCCESS STORY , with MORE THAN A
MILLION now in both Florida and
Louisiana.’
St. Augustine Farm. The Smithsonian’s National
Zoo considers the alligator to be a modern
‘conservation success story’, with over a million of
these reptiles now residing in both Florida and
Louisiana. Adult American Alligators comprise six to
eight hundred pounds of pure muscle, with one third
of the body weight concentrated in the formidable
tail that functions as a propeller in the water. The