Ray Carson went down the Okefenokee Swamp in an aluminum boat with a fishing rod and his video camera. How else are you going to prove your fish tales? But what he caught on tape was more than a prize catfish. Three hundred alligators gathered for a cooperative feeding.
“Something that I’ll say you don’t see very often at all. Even people that have worked at the park, most of them say that they’ve never seen something like that,” said Jerry Waters of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources.
But National Geographic says alligators sharing their food isn’t uncommon.
“There could be multiple reasons [for the alligators to swarm],” herpetologist Kenneth Kryskof said. “But they’re usually known to congregate when they’re breeding as well as when they’re feeding.”
In fact, the science magazine warns to not call it a “feeding frenzy” because that denotes violence. The gators didn’t attack Carson. He says he just “eased on through” the mob. Instead, scientists prefer to dub the phenomenon “cooperative feeding” because that’s what the reptiles are doing. They’re opening their mouths and letting the fish come to them.
Photo by http2007 via Flickr.