Drs. Wade Ryberg (front) and Jim Cathey work with an 8 foot alligator.Later this afternoon and old friend of mine will stop by for a visit after being outside of Texas for several years. Dr. Wade Ryberg and I first met in about 1998. At the time, I was a biologist for Texas Parks and Wildlife and Wade was a graduate student in the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences at Texas A&M University.
My fellow TPWD biologists and I wanted to learn more about the population biology of American Alligators that inhabited Catfish Creek a tributary of the Trinity River, that runs through the Gus Engeling Wildlife Management Area.
Of course, to learn more about alligators we had to capture them. People asked how do you catch alligators and the answer was...very carefully! Better yet, have someone else do it! This is where Wade and several interns came into play. These interns are now seasoned biologists with Texas AgriLife Extension Service, Texas Parks and Wildlife, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and private industry like Plateau Land and Wildlife Management. Man, what a great group of people! Anytime you instruct someone to grab an alligator by the face and don't let go and they do it, you have to 1) wonder about their sanity and 2) respect their tenacity.
Large box traps were used to capture alligators up to 10 ft long.We used a variety of methods for capture, including: large box traps, poles with snares, and the most exciting, hand grabs. Snare poles and hand grabs work fine for alligators up to about 3 feet or so and box traps typically capture 4 footers and larger. We often worked at night to capture the smaller alligators as they give off red eye shine when illuminated with with a flashlight. One night, I had 13 baby alligators folded in the tail of my T-shirt, as I waded around a beaver pond. Looking back I was fortunate that their momma did not respond to their calls for help. Females can be very protective around nest sites.
I remember capturing over 200 alligators, ranging in size of 10 inch hatchlings to a 10 ft male and 1 female that was even larger. This old gal meant to kill us if she could lay a tooth on us. Of course we put her in that situation and I can't blame her much. She should have been over 10 feet, but had a portion of her tail bitten off by another alligator, she had only 1 eye, and a tooth from the bottom row of teeth was protruding through her upper jaw. As the say, she had been there and back! All of our alligators were measured, marked and returned to Catfish Creek.
In addition to the field work, Wade conducted genetic assessments of 3 inland populations and 3 coastal populations of alligators (Journal of Experimental Zoology, 2002, 294:325-333). He found that all populations on occasion shared genetic information through immigration and breeding; however barriers to dispersal such as distance, made each group genetically different enough to warrant localized management of each.
Capture is the easy part, but turning loose of an alligator is more complex than it sounds. Smarter biologists stay away from the end with the teeth (Drs. Cathey and Locke), while others remove binding from the mouth (Dr. Ryberg and Corey Mason).