Year of the Gator

In college basketball, this is the Year of the Gator. Florida's team was the first from the state to win the national championship. The FSU team made a grab for the gold ring in 1972 but fell a few points short.

In the carnivorous world of Mother Nature, this is also the Year of the Gator. Three alligators have mistaken three women for lunch, which is a flippant and irresponsible way of saying three women suffered horrible deaths at the hands, or rather jaws, of reptiles left over from the days of dinosaurs. Two of the gators measured about nine feet long.

A gator's modus operandi is to lie still, imitating a log under water until something goes by that looks like prey. Its method of killing is to drag the prey under water and hold it until it stops bubbling and kicking. One of the victims, a tourist from Tennessee, was snorkeling in shallow water. Another, a college student, was jogging along a canal and apparently was dragged under water. The circumstances of the third death are uncertain because "drug taking equipment" was found at the scene.

To put this into historical context, Florida experienced only 16 fatalities due to gator attacks between 1948 and 2005, plus one in Georgia, not to mention nine "suspected alligator killings." Those fatalities represent about 4.3 percent of gator attacks. We've now had three fatalities in a week. There are several factors at work, here. Warm weather has arrived, and mating season has begun. The drought has dried up gator holes, causing gators to search for food and water in residential areas. The boom in residential housing has caused natural gator habitat to be filled up with houses, people, and small dogs, which gators seem to fancy. These factors added together do not explain why three women have been killed by gators in a week.

Florida counts about 1.5 million gators in the state, almost one gator per ten people. A thousand new residents stream into Florida every day, which is both bad news and good news from a gator's perspective. Bad news: Your habitat is diminishing. Good news: Your food source is increasing.

There is a moral to this story for Yankees who want to sell their homes and put a thousand miles between their friends and their new Florida home. The moral is: Stay home. Between hurricanes and gators, you don't want to live here.