I’ve been following the tragedy in Orlando, FL at a Disney property involving a 3 yo boy and an alligator.
As I understand it, the child’s body was recovered intact, which surprised me. Why would an alligator attack a small child if not for food? Could it be territorial behavior, the alligator saw the child as a threat to it’s territory?
I’ve seem films of alligators and crocodiles taking down a large prey animal and dismembering it in order to eat it. So why would an alligator attack a child if not for food?
It was for food. Alligators/crocodiles store food underwater while it “tenderizes”. Without hands, the food needs to be falling off the bone tender before they can tear it apart.
It might have been exploratory. The animal did not know whether the victim would be good to eat, decided it was not, and chose not to consume the rest. This has been suggested as the explanation for why sharks sometimes stop attacking after inflicting a bite, or why cats leave dead animals on your doorstep. It is just tragic that its experimentation had to be fatal.
Yeah, I’d imagine they have a “chomp first, decide if it’s good later” policy. Also, the father immediately attacked, and the area quickly filled with lights and searchers so the alligator probably figured this meal wasn’t worth the trouble.
running coach has already posted the most likely explanation. This behavior is well-documented in alligators. No need to project shark behavior onto them.
I suspect the gator was fairly small ( under 6ft) in this case he would have to let nature tenderize it a bit before he could tear it apart. I never saw a report on the actual size of the gator.
Actually, gators are quite good at tearing large food items apart, aided by inertia and water resistance. They will bite onto a part of the prey animal, especially a limb, and vigorously shake their head. Alternatively, after grabbing they will spin rapidly on their long axis. The weight slash inertia of the body, or its resistance to movement through the water, allows the gator to rip off swallow-sized chunks. Lather, rinse, repeat until the prey has been completely disassembled and ingested.
Gators do sometimes stash prey underwater, and said prey may rot, facilitating ingestion. Gators have no objection to rotten food, and it is believed that this behavior may be a deliberate strategy to deal with oversized items. But ‘stash to rot’ may be an accidental secondary effect of ‘stashed for some other reason’. Stashing may instead primarily serve to hide prey from competing gators, allowing the ‘owner’ to eat in secrecy after any alligator-alerting commotion from the capture has subsided. Also, temperature plays a major role in gator behavior, and stashing may be related to ambient conditions that are less than optimum for digestion.
In sum, stashing of prey is indeed a common alligator behavior and causes no surprise in this instance. But the exact role that stashing plays in gator biology is not entirely certain.
I am thinking that in this case, the alligator was simply scared off … there were efforts to chase the alligator and people raced around the shoreline to try to spot the child, because if the child might have been dropped at the surface within the first two minutes it might have survived.
The alligators are scared to be near adult humans and scared to be caught on land, but they will go after small animals which are within a foot or so of the waters surface.
(The sign “no swimming” seems to understand the risk there…The alligator there is seemingly preferring to keeps its feet wet, but other than that, it will take anything that isn’t too large, and looks like an animal.)
This alligator had an experience its never had before and was scared off. The father wrestled with it. So imagine you are a happy little alligator, going around the lagoon eating small animals, and some giant interrupts you and wrestles you… you’d be scared for your life wouldn’t you ??
In other alligator-human interactions, the alligators are not scared off and are easily found nearby keeping a watch out for a chance to grab some more food. That wasn’t the case this time, they were definitely scared off by the scariness of the aggressive adult human invading their patch… To them, it was like being attacked by a giant squid or monster size shark.