The Starkville Rotary Club learned a thing or two about alligators Monday, when Sam D. Hamilton Noxubee Wildlife Refuge Director Steve Reagan spoke.
Reagan discussed the refuge’s alligator population, as well as his doctoral research on alligators in Louisiana. Prior to his work with alligators, Reagan was involved in bear research in Wyoming.
“It’s a pretty stable population,” Reagan said of the refuge alligators. “It was started in the 1960s, and it’s grown to be about 200 animals, maybe a high of 250 animals. The alligators are some of the biggest alligators I’ve ever seen, mostly because they haven’t been disturbed.” Reagan said the largest refuge alligators were approximately 14 feet in length, and possibly some of the original animals introduced to the refuge in the 1960’s.
He said the population was on the decline, but not in a drastic manner. Reagan attributed the decrease partly to the unusually cold winter and the lake freezing over.
“This last winter, the alligators were actually so cold that when ice formed on the lake, they couldn’t hold their breath any longer,” Reagan said. “They had to freeze their nose through the ice. Half of those alligators will be dead by August."
However, Reagan said the deaths wouldn’t have too drastic of an effect on the refuge’s population, due to the longevity of the species.
“If you lose all young alligators this year, it really makes no difference,” Reagan said. “Their parents are eating them. It’s just offset the future. That’s where they go for the long game. They’re not playing the short game. Unless it happens every year, which it won’t, that’s when it’ll be more of an issue.”
He also discussed his initial alligator research in Louisiana, in which he attempted to substantiate claims made in the book “The Alligator’s Life History” by Edward Avery McIlhenny.
“What it all comes down to is this one little book,” Reagan said. “This little paperback book was published in 1935 by McIlhenny the Tabasco hot sauce owner. He had eight alligators that he followed, and he wrote the book on alligators. Everything we think we know about alligators is basically based off of this book.”
However, he said his research proved many claims made in the book to be less than substantial. He also said, using the large sample size he had access to at the Sabine National Wildlife Refuge in southwest Louisiana led to more sound results than the smaller sample sizes used in previous studies.
“The biggest difference between this study and any other study that had been done with alligators before was big numbers, large numbers of alligators,” Reagan said. “In all studies before this, high numbers for alligator research were like 15 alligators. They follow 15 alligators through time, see what happens and make all kinds of assumptions out of it. Well, we proposed we do hundreds of alligators.”
Reagan also urged the public not to feed alligators at the Refuge or anywhere else.
“The brain is as big as the end of your thumb, either ‘eat’ or ‘don’t eat’ basically,” Reagan said. “They don’t do a whole lot of reasoning, but if you teach them a human hand is something to do with food, then they don’t care if you’re holding something or not. All they know is food came out of that type of thing, and they’re going to try to eat it.”