Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Do alligators keep kids from learning how to swim?

Usually "ooga-booga" references around here from the international experts involve Africa.

African crocodiles don't mess around, in fact one of the first Peace Corps Volunteers in the '60's won a Darwin Award by disregarding warnings about crocodiles; never did make it across that river even on his first try. IIRC that was in Kenya. None where I was, not big ones anyway, maybe they were all hunted out I dunno.

What we had was something worse; bladder flukes, schistosomiasis, alternate host a water snail. Tiny sperm-looking larvae releassed in clouds by the parastized snail burrowed through the skin on contact, grew to an inch long on your bladder while feeding on your blood, the hundreds of razor sharp eggs it laid most every day cutting a permanent ulcer in the bladder and causing massive scarring in your kidneys and liver where the eggs that didn't fall into your bladder ended up. Average worm lifespan; 12 years.

Couldn't even get water from a river or stream splashed on you. A buddy got it, he went swimming in a lake at a place he figured was far enough from human input, he was wrong. The cure was anti-cancer type drugs, which drugs attack rapidly dividing cells. The worm fit that description, it shed and regenerated its skin constantly to cast off clinging antibodies, the rest of it was an egg factory. The cure harsh, the worm dying first on account of it was so much smaller than you were.

The limiting factor is water, of course. Other than that any sizeable body of water is gonna have them; Lake Corpus Christi and Choke Canyon reservoir for example.

Around here there is a series of old raw-sewage impoundments just off the South Side collectively called Mitchell Lake. basically eight to ten feet of old sewage sludge (in use for eighty years prior to the eighties) overlain by about two feet of brackish alkaline water. A highly artificial ecosystem that generates swarms of midges, few fish. Draws big numbers of migrating shorebirds hence now its an Audubon Birding Center.

It does have swarms of turtles, which eat the midges, and alligators that apparently eat the turtles. Some big gators too.

No alligators I am aware of north and west of here, I get the impression that an alligator in the Austin area is big news.

Urban legend, having spent a lifetime around alligators it is something I know. If it were true some coonass would have saddled one up and entered it at Evangeline Downs.

From the San Diego Zoo website (in context of this article croc is crocodilian to include alligators). Short distance as in yards not several hundred yards.

"crocs can swim up to 20 miles per hour (32 kilometers per hour) and can run on land as fast as 11 miles per hour (17.6 kilometers per hour) for short distances if they need to!"


San Diego Zoo

I am somewhat of an accomplished swimmer but I've quit on account of the big aggressive gators. Swimming pools with chlorinated piss don't interest me and the Gulf of Mexico where I used to swim gave my grand daughter an infection that was hell to cure. The Gulf any where near the Mississippi sewer could give you no telling what. When I was a teenager working on a trawler I swam every day until a huge shark came out from under the boat just before I jumped in.

I knew it wasn't true when it was posted the first time.

I think that's total BS. At least I know that African crocodiles can't.

When a big snapping turtle reared up and hissed at a young niece and nephew they ran like the devil was after 'em for about a hundred yards. That's seems excessive until you realize a young child has no idea how fast a snapping turtle can run. If the aliens land and out of the spaceship stumbles some snapping turtle-ish creature I'll run too.

By the way, Birdwatcher, van Hiele would be proud of your connecting these particular dots (Santa Anna's capture, alligators, swimming, etc.).

If it were the case, nobody in SE Texas or SW Louisiana would know how to swim. Only one guy got et I can remember and he was from Indiana. You don't feed 'em off the dock at night, then jump in with them.

Up in northern Australia the crocs can and do eat people. Not only do you not want to swim, but you don't want to be hanging around too close to the edge of the water. There was even a bloke grabbed out of a small boat not long back, and dragged down to his doom, and there have been people grabbed out of tents near the water.

They can be big and strong enough to grab a buffalo and drag it into the water, and there's no reasoning with them.

There was a toddler killed by a gator at Disney World a couple of years ago. Lane Graves was wading in Seven Seas Lagoon by the Grand Floridian Resort where he was staying with his family. It doesn't happen often, but once is often enough if it happens to your family or the family of a friend.

Noah Smithwick from the 1820's has an account of a 14 yo slave girl being grabbed by the arm while sleeping and dragged towards the water by a big alligator, far enough away for her screams to effect a rescue. Smithwick spoke of alligator attacks on humans in East Texas as a regular occurrence tho he was quoted about 60 years after the fact.

https://books.google.com/books?id=H..._r&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false


Weren't alligators heavily hunted down to threatened status at one time? Maybe the more timid and wary ones are the progenitors of the ones we have today.

One of the more improbable Darwin Awards, five years back...

....remains found in the alligator's stomach were described as "consistent with the injuries to Riggins"

Musta been the same size foot, or something....

https://www.newsweek.com/alligator-euthanized-after-eating-florida-burglary-suspect-402777


A pity about the alligator.

Um, yes..... van Hiele... of course......

Alligators were always around when I was growing up, but not nearly in the numbers that we see today. They were in ponds and rivers where we swam, but stayed away from us. They were always very skittish and would disappear when people showed up. We did everything we could to encourage that sense of fear in the alligators. Most people in the area would have argued at the time that there weren't any around, but they were there if you knew where to look.

The ones I am around today seem to have lost much of their fear of humans. I think thats mostly because people want to see them and throw fish and food scraps to them.

I have a beach house on a SC coastal island that has gators in every pond and tidal creek. I have even seen them on the beach in the surf and tidal pools. These are gators that you had better pay attention to, if they are close. Don't let your dog get close to the ponds or go for a swim in one of the creeks on any of the coastal islands in the South. A gator pulled the arm off a golfer a few years ago that was reaching into a water hazard to get a golf ball. If it hadn't been for his quick thinking buddies, that grabbed the old gentleman and won the tug of war, he would have been a goner. The gator was about 10 feet long and didn't survive for very long after the encounter.

While we swam in the ponds and rivers in SE Georgia in the 50's and 60's, I would think twice about doing it now. You never know which pond is going to have a gator show up in it and the things don't seem to be skittish at all anymore.

Thanks Mike .

Wow some crazy parasites ++ in africa - note to self - i'll live here .

Thank you for the longest "yes" in recorded history.

I wonder if century upon century of people living in schit holes doesn't make the inability to swim genetic?

So, could a gator win the Kentucky Derby? Nope.

The assertion I made in another thread was apparently not well constructed, so let me rephrase. A smaller gator, say 6-8' in length, has a 0-full speed distance that is startingly short. They can, if motivated, smoke a horse out of the gate, 7 days a week. How far they will stay out front is debatable of course. Real problem is figuring out how to arrange the race if one is inclined to test it. You'll need to figure out how to keep the gator motivated and the horse under control.

Big lizards are not so fast to launch on land, it's not their MO. I doubt the are as fast as the kids due to their mass. I'm speaking about the 10-14' version.

All sizes share a common trait. Their strike is one of the fastest of all creatures on earth and if you're within 6-10' of one when it decides you're table fare, the odds are vastly against you.

Call it BS if you want, but in the real world ignore it at your own risk. At least have an otter or two by your side before doing so.