Alligator babies - Ianaré Sévi

People from all over the US have been crying foul, over the way an American woman killed a humongous 465 kilogram alligator in South Carolina.

Mary Ellen Mara-Christian, a 48 year old thrill seeker, has really made quite an impact across the US, as the small woman who conquered a huge gator.

However, the way in which she killed it has been getting some rather angry persons lashing back. She took two hours to finally kill the beast.

“This woman should be in jail, not on TV,” wrote one outraged user on carolinalive.com, a new website out of South Carolina.

You see, it took them two hours to tie the gator up, and then proceeded to shoot it 8 times with a .22 calibre gun. However, the 8 shots did nothing to ease the alligator of its suffering, and she eventually killed the poor thing by ripping out its spinal cord.
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The general concensus of the online world is that her bahavior is nothing more than “senseless brutality”.
“They tortured that alligator for hours. That’s just plain sick,” a commenter wrote on Bostonherald.com.

“This is trophy hunting at its worst,” commented another reader on Cbsnews.com.

However Mrs. Mara-Christian is very proud of herself, and says the act was to do her part to save the alligators, as part of her idea of population control.

“I hunt because I want these creatures to be here forever,” she commented to The Boston Herald.

Well, this reporter, while having no great love for gators, sides with the online readers consensus, there was no need to torture it before killing it.. There is no talk of criminal charges, but there should be…

A 10-year study of Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge alligators has yielded some surprising results. Despite having plenty of suitable males to choose among, up to 70 percent of the female gators in this Louisiana refuge preferred to mate with the same male year after another. Also, females who mated with more than one male per breeding season and produced young from multiple fathers usually continued to mate with their select group of males year after year, thus displaying a form of polygamous fidelity.

“Given how incredibly open and dense the alligator population is at RWR, we didn’t expect to find fidelity,” biologist Stacey Lance of the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory in South Carolina said in a press release. “To actually find that 70 percent of our re-trapped females showed mate fidelity was really incredible. I don’t think any of us expected that the same pair of alligators that bred together in 1997 would still be breeding together in 2005 and may still be producing nests together to this day.”

Most reptiles are polygamous and will choose a new mate or mates each breeding season, and only a few reptilian species are known to actively choose the same mate or mates over and over again.

Since the Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge is so densely populated with alligators, researchers don’t think that the repeated pairings are the result of chance.

The study has been published in the journal Molecular Ecology.

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/117989598/home

We have updated the crocodillian section of the site and it is now possible to find info about most crocodillians in it.

American Alligator
American Crocodile
Black Caiman
Broad Snouted Caiman
Brown Caiman
Chinese Alligator
Cuban Crocodile
Dwarf Crocodile
False Gavial
Freshwater Crocodile
Gavial
Mexican Crocodile
Mugger Crocodile
New Guinea Crocodile
Nile Crocodile
Orinoco Crocodile
Philippine Crocodile
Rio Apaporis Caiman
Saltwater Crocodile
Siamese Crocodile
Slender-snouted Crocodile
Smooth-fronted Caiman
Spectacled Caiman
Yacare Caiman

Crocodile Facts
American Crocodile facts
Nile Crocodile facts
Saltwater Crocodile facts

Alligator Snapping Turtles carry a reputation of fear, weighing in at over 200 lbs (90 kg) and packing a bite that earned the word Alligator in its name. Perhaps, the last place you would expect to find such a fearsome reptile, would be in the bustling city of New York. That is unless, like 45lb fluffy, you were housed there to protect the illegal drugs of your owner. Fluffy was rescued during a Long Island drug raid. Since his rescue, he has been relocated to a New England Aquarium as an attraction for their new Killer Instincts exhibit.

So, while Fluffy’s owner may be facing some hard time in the big house, Fluffy will be living a care free life in a turtle appropriate and drug-free environment. Congratulations Fluffy.

For more information on Alligator Snapping Turtles and a picture of Fluffy visit: http://www.practicalfishkeeping.co.uk/pfk/pages/item.php?news=1669

picture provided by Creative Commons at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/.

 (disclaimer: Creative Commons has no affiliation to the AC or the views or thoughts published in this article.)