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Alligators Caught Climbing Fences and Swimming Across Roads in Florida

Web Staff
By Web Staff
August 20, 2019Trending
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Alligators Caught Climbing Fences and Swimming Across Roads in Florida
Alligator in Florida in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. on Feb. 27, 2019. (Sam Greenwood/Getty Images)

Most people know alligators get just about everywhere in Florida, but now they’ve really leveled up.

A video from last week shows one swimming in the middle of a busy road—and another climbing a fence.

One of the intrusive reptiles was filmed on Aug. 15 swimming in a giant puddle in the middle of an intersection during a downpour in St. Petersburg. Facebook user Roger Light Jr. caught it on video.

Another gator in Jacksonville took a cue from a viral “Storm Area 51” Facebook post.

Someone caught this animal climbing the fence at the naval air station in the city, and, no, we didn’t know they could climb fences either.

The gator made a much more graceful landing than many of us would have.

Surprise Alligator Encounters

Earlier in May, a man on vacation in Florida was in for a big surprise when he came back to his rented home and found an alligator chilling in the pool on an alligator raft.

He was in the town to attend a wedding and said the alligator was actually lured by the family’s small dog.

When the family came back home, they were amazed to find the alligator chilling in the pool on a green alligator raft.

There has been an increase in reports of close encounters with alligators in Florida and experts said it’s because summers speed up their metabolism and make them hungry.

Alligators also move around when they are looking for mates during the mating season. North Port Police had to deal with one hiding under a man’s car in a parking lot on April 12.

Gator Bites in Florida

According to Inside Science, a science news publication, gator bites in Florida “have been on the rise, increasing from an average of just one every three years between 1988 and 1999 to about seven per year between 2000 and 2016.”

Statistics from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission differ, but still, show an increase in the number of alligator bites suffered by humans since gators came off the endangered species list. Bites have increased from about six per year from 1971 through 1986 to about 10 per year from 1987 through 2017, according to FWC data.

As population and development have increased in Florida, scientists said, so too have alligator attacks.

University of North Florida researchers, studying the interaction between humans and alligators, presented their findings to the Ecological Society of America earlier this month. Of the many factors they studied, including temperature and rain, they found that humans were the only logical thing to blame for conflicts.

“Using simple pairwise linear regression, we found that only human population size was a reliable predictor of alligator attack rates in Florida during the period 1988-2016,” Morgan Golden-Ebanks and Adam E. Rosenblatt wrote in the study. “As a result, management of human-alligator conflict should focus on limiting human-alligator interactions and preventing the further development of areas used by alligators.”

Epoch Times reporter Venus Upadhayaya, The CNN Wire and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

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