As more Florida residents and visitors hit the water this summer, chances of aggressive alligator encounters seem to be on the rise, as documented by several local news stories over the last two weeks.
On June 21 in the Rainbow River near Dunnellon, Florida a 19-year-old snorkeler was attacked by an 8-foot gator about noon. The gator grabbed the man around his head and neck inflicting deep cuts, serious bleeding and severe injuries, according to a Marion County Fire Rescue report.
The young man was transported to a local hospital that day, where he was treated and released the following day.
Florida alligator trappers captured and removed the large 8-foot, 3-inch gator from the Rainbow River, with swimmers and snorkelers returning soon thereafter.
On June 28 near Orlando, 31-year-old Brittany Clark from Sacramento, California was mauled by a large alligator. Clark was swimming in the Econlockhatchee River during a break from hiking with some friends in the Little Big Econ State Forest outside Orlando.
A huge alligator bit Clark on both her arms while she was in 3 feet of water. Her friends called authorities and tried to save her. But following the severe trauma and blood loss from the attack, she died while being transported to a local hospital. Recently released body-cam footage shows a first responder rushing to the scene of the attack.
Following Clark’s attack, state wildlife officers captured and killed a 12-foot and a 13-foot alligator from the area. Testing is ongoing to learn if one of those gators was the one that attacked Clark.
Then the evening of July 3, James McMicken, 71, was fishing in a canal behind his home in North Fort Myers. That’s when a large alligator lunged at him from the water, latched onto his right leg and dragged him into the canal.
“He rolled me down off the bank into the water. I stuck my thumb in his eye. And I just took that fishing pole and stabbed him in that other eye and jabbed him, and jabbed him. It seemed like forever, but it wasn’t that long. But then he turned loose,” McMicken told a local television station.
McMicken was helped to his feet by his dog, which he had called to him. “I’d have never made it crawling this far, so I called my dog over, and she stood there and let me get up on her back to where I could get stood up,” he told the station.
He struggled back to his home where his wife attended to his severely wounded right leg. He soon passed out in a chair, and was transported to a hospital in Cape Coral where he is recovering.
While gator attacks on humans are relatively rare, they happen annually in Florida where over one million of the reptiles are found – in every one of the state’s 67 counties.
There were two fatal attacks last year in the Sunshine State, with 13 total attacks reported. State wildlife officials began recording human-gator attacks in 1948, with about 500 documented since that time.
“Right now in summer is when gator-human encounters are most common,” Florida licensed alligator trapper Chadwick Lairsey told Outdoor Life. “School’s out, summer vacations are happening, people are in the water swimming and gators are abundant.
“Alligators are just coming off their breeding season, and female gators are around their nests guarding young – and they can be aggressive.”
Lairsey has caught hundreds of alligators during his six years as a licensed state gator trapper. He’s handled and removed nuisance gators over 12-feet-long and weighing more than 600 pounds.
“Alligators are in their natural environment, and when we intrude on it, problems happen,” says Lairsey, 37, from Jacksonville, Florida. “We’ve got to be careful all the time around water. We just don’t want to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Lairsey often has captured large nuisance alligators from golf course waterways, canals, and residential lakes and ponds where human conflicts are common. He and his wife Lindsey have removed big gators from homeowners’ ponds.
“We caught a big one at a residential pond and a kid’s party was going on next door,” he said. “We caught the gator and the kids saw it. They all rushed over wanting to touch it and get photos with it.”
The recent Florida drought may have something to do with so many recent gator attacks, he theorizes.
“Big gators that usually are prowling and moving around looking for mates in spring may have stayed in the places still having plenty of water,” he says. “That concentrates gators, and when swimmers show up to cool off, they’re intruding on reptile turf. That can spell trouble.”