The Gator Nation is getting frisky, but this time it’s not just the students.
Alligator mating season begins in mid to late April, and Paynes Prairie workers are hearing the bellows of males in the mood.
“When somebody’s trying to start a lawn mower and it won’t start, that’s what a large male gator sounds like when it starts bellowing,” said Jan Powell, a volunteer at the Paynes Prairie Visitor Center.
Powell, who has been working at the prairie center for nine years, said alligators will travel from one body of water to another to find a mate during the warmer months. Powell said it is impossible for park rangers to keep tabs on every animal during mating season because Paynes Prairie covers more than 21,000 acres of freshwater marsh.
She said although rangers typically leave alligator nests alone, trails have been closed off to visitors for safety reasons in the past. While an attack has never happened, Powell said 99 percent of the time an interaction between a human and an alligators occurs, the human was doing something stupid.
Max A. Nickerson, the curator of the Division of Herpetology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, does not perceive the season to be a threat to people on campus either.
“I haven’t seen any gators large enough recently to be of mating age,” he said.
Nickerson said male gators reach mating maturity when they grow longer than 6 feet, and the ones he’s seen on campus were only about 4 feet. In addition, Nickerson believes precautions have been taken in the past few years to ensure the safety of people and their pets on campus.
Alligators aren’t typically a problem to humans unless there is food around, he said.
