If not, how long do we have to wait? It’s going to be 65F in Chicago tomorrow. That’s happened a lot lately so, because I’m too intellectually lazy to bother investigating more, I’m blaming it on Global Warming. The Illinois River is chock full of Asian Carp, an invasive species from, well, Asia. They are cleaner and tastier than the ones in Asia, but folks there prefer fresh, not froze, so that market has not decimated the carp population like I hoped. Folks here mostly don’t like carp so my hopes that Man would do his thing and make them extinct fell through. This leaves natural predators to clean up our mess, and in this case that means gators, but the cold winters up here have kept them out of the Illinois for hundreds or thousands of years. Winters are warmer now, and likely to get warmer. Will it soon be warm enough to allow gators to dig dens warm enough for them to winter over? Because I want to see the look on those carps’ faces when they meet a new top predator.
No.
At the rate their range is extending, a good long while. (The significant temperature is not that of the warmest winter days, but rather the coldest.)
Perhaps you could fetch a few from Florida and haul them to Chicago?
Virginia I think is considerably warmer than the Chicago area and we do not have gators in the Potomac or any other Va river. Far as I know. They’d be useful, too because the Potomac now has snakeheads (also from Asia) and they are invasive (and apparently tasty).
People largely won’t eat Asian carp because they think it is related to common carp. It isn’t. Fishermen also have a low opinion of them because they are not a game fish; they won’t strike any bait as they’re herbavore/filter feeders. That and the jumping.
They actually taste just fine, but you have to know how to fillet around their odd bones. There’s good videos on YouTube for this.
Alligator Gars have been found as far north as Meredosia, Illinois on the Illinois river.
This page suggests that alligators can survive in freezing temperatures to some extent:
As an FYI, there is a successful gator farm near Twin Falls, Idaho (on Snake River) where they do just fine. Kinda neat seeing them with snow on-ground or even during blizzards. Here’s a vid I found (YouTube, fwiw).
Of course, the area there is well-known locally for its warm/hot springs, and in that video you can see the flow rate of the springs feeding the farm itself. IIRC, the water is not as warm as the ‘swimming/bathing’ places just upriver, but it is definitely not typical snow-melt runoff or whatever. When river flow is low, the river downstream of Hagerman’s hot springs tend to be a bit warmer than usual, but I am unsure if it stays warm enough for year-round gator living.
Yeah, but this spate of mild winters is just a few years old. On its own not long enough to project a trend, but long enough to raise an eyebrow and trigger this thread.
But were gators ever native to the Potomac or its tributaries? They just need to keep moving up the Mississippi and turn right at Grafton.
We had a snakehead scare, but nothing came of it.
Atlanta has always been well north of the gator line, but we’ve had more and more gator sightings in the past few years. The authorities always say the gators found here must be released pets, but I am not so sure. I suspect they are simply expanding their range northward as temperatures increase.
It is more than just the past few winters that have been warmer; here is a comparison of the hardiness zone maps from 1990 and 2012, which show significant changes.
Although, these maps show longer-term trends; I can tell you that Zone 6 isn’t really appropriate for where I live anymore (the 2012 map puts me in the middle of it); Zone 6 means minimum temperatures of 0 to 10 below, while official NWS records show that temperatures haven’t been below 0 since 1999; Zone 7 would seem more appropriate (0-10 above; zones are further split into A and B, for 0-5 and 5-10 in this case).
Of course, I know you mean the past few winters, which have been much warmer than the trend, although a warm winter overall doesn’t mean that there aren’t colder days. If anything, temperatures have been more volatile with warm and cold extremes:
A low of 31 below is in Zone 3 (scale here), when Oklahoma is shown as mostly Zone 7 (of course, the zones depict typical extreme minimum temperatures).
Four foot Alligator (or Cayman) found in pond Richmond Missouri, East Northeast of Kansas City.