49 Fun Facts About Alligator

How does a mother alligator move her newly hatched young from the nest to the water?

In her mouth. The same jaws that can crack a turtle's shell ferry the hatchlings to the water a mouthful at a time without harming one.

The word 'alligator' is an English mangling of a Spanish phrase meaning what?

The lizard. Spanish explorers in Florida called the animal el lagarto, and English speakers ran the article and the noun together into a single word.

The critically endangered Chinese alligator survives in the wild along the lower reaches of which river?

Yangtze. It is even called the Yangtze alligator, and the thousands bred in captivity now far outnumber the few hundred at most left in the wild.

Why can alligators spend only short spells in salt water?

They lack salt glands. Crocodiles have working ones, which is one reason the two share South Florida as they do: crocodiles on the salty coast, alligators inland.

What determines whether an alligator egg hatches as a male or a female?

The nest temperature. Cooler nests, at about 30°C or below, hatch females, and nests just a few degrees warmer turn out mostly males.

What do you see when an alligator, unlike a crocodile, closes its mouth?

Only the upper teeth show. An alligator has an overbite, so its upper jaw hides the bottom row, while a crocodile's big fourth lower tooth stays on view outside the snout.

An alligator's snout is usually described as which shape, compared with a crocodile's?

Broad and U-shaped. The wide snout suits a generalist: alligators take prey from small fish up to deer, while needle-jawed relatives such as the gharial stick mostly to fish.

About how many teeth can an alligator get through in a lifetime?

3,000 or so. Teeth are replaced as they wear down, so a mouth that holds about 80 at a time gets through dozens of full sets.

What are the stones called that alligators swallow and hold in the first part of their stomach?

Gastroliths. Alligator teeth can grip prey but not chew it, so the swallowed stones are thought to help grind food down, though some animals carry them as ballast.

Which type of sound in male alligators' mating bellows makes the water over their backs 'dance'?

Infrasound. An audible note has started the bellowing too: a B flat played on a tuba at one Florida park made captive alligators roar back.

Apart from other crocodilians, alligators' closest living relatives are which animals?

Birds. Crocodilians and birds are the last living branches of the group that also produced the dinosaurs, so a gator is closer kin to a sparrow than to a snake.

Why does US law list the recovered American alligator as threatened?

A rarer lookalike. Hunters could confuse it with the American crocodile, so the alligator, declared recovered in 1987, keeps federal protection.

The American alligator is the official state reptile of Florida, Louisiana and which third state?

Mississippi. It was the last of the three to adopt the alligator, in 2005, though scientists had called the species mississippiensis ever since it was first classified.

What colour do an alligator's eyes appear to glow when a light catches them at night?

Red. A mirror-like layer behind the retina bounces light back through the eye, giving the alligator a second chance to catch it when hunting in the dark.

The largest alligator ever reported, over 19 feet, was shot in 1890 by a member of the family behind which hot sauce?

Tabasco. Edward McIlhenny said he left the animal on a muddy Louisiana bank because it was too heavy to move, so no specimen exists to prove the record.

What name is given to the small ponds alligators dig that hold water through the dry season?

Alligator holes. They stay wet when the marsh around them dries out, so other wildlife crowds in to drink and feed, which is why the alligator counts as a keystone species.

Which surprising food was documented in American alligator diets in 2013?

Fruit. The seeds pass through or are spat out far from the parent plant, so scientists think alligators may quietly help forests spread.

Which invasive South American rodent, a Louisiana marsh menace, is a favourite alligator meal?

Nutria. Their grazing strips the coastal marsh bare, so Louisiana pays registered hunters and trappers a bounty for every nutria tail they hand in.

Alligators have been photographed catching and eating which unexpected marine animals?

Sharks. A 2017 study confirmed alligators eating bonnethead, lemon and nurse sharks and a stingray, and found old accounts of sharks eating alligators in turn.

What urban myth surrounded Saturn, the alligator who died at Moscow Zoo in 2020?

He had been Hitler's pet. The truth was stranger: he escaped when bombs wrecked the Berlin Zoo, was found by British soldiers in 1946 and was handed over to the Soviets.

Muja, the oldest known alligator in captivity as of 2025, has lived since 1937 at a zoo in which European capital?

Belgrade. He has lived there through the German bombing of 1941, the Allied bombing of 1944 and the NATO air raids of 1999.

Unlike the American alligator, the Chinese alligator has bony armour plates on which part of its body?

Its belly. It is armoured all round, and its blunt teeth are built for crushing the snails and other hard-shelled molluscs it eats.

Hunting for which part of the alligator put the species on the endangered list in the 1960s?

Its hide. Once the trade in skins was brought under control, the alligator bounced back so fast that it came off the endangered list within twenty years.

Sewer inspectors were said to have first reported alligators beneath which US city in 1935, seeding an urban legend?

New York. The claim comes from the city's sewer chief, Teddy May, who said he disbelieved his inspectors at first; folklorists suspect he made much of it up.

How does an alligator deal with prey that is too big to swallow whole?

Spins to tear off chunks. The move is known as the death roll: the alligator bites down and whirls on its own axis until a swallowable piece twists free.

Which mammal is the chief raider of alligator nests?

Raccoons. They dig out the eggs even though the mother stays close to the mound all through incubation and rushes back when it is threatened.

The Gator Bowl, held continuously since 1946, is played in which Florida city?

Jacksonville. The bowl gave its name to the city's stadium in 1948, and the NFL ground that opened on the site in 1995 became the game's new home.

How far up the Atlantic coast does the American alligator's natural range reach?

North Carolina. Alligators cope with cold better than other crocodilians and can even get through short freezes, which lets them live that far from the tropics.

Which parts of a floating alligator stay just above the water while the rest of its body is hidden?

Eyes, ears and nostrils. They all sit high on the head, so the animal can watch, listen and breathe while its body stays under the surface.

Besides bellowing, how do male alligators signal to rivals and mates at a distance?

Slapping their heads on the water. The male lifts his head and slams it down, and because sound travels faster in water the crack carries a long way.

Which History series, first aired in 2010, follows alligator hunters in the Atchafalaya Basin?

Swamp People. The stakes are real: its hunters earn most of their year's income during the thirty-day season the series follows.

In the 1980 film 'Alligator', the giant reptile reaches the sewers after being flushed down what?

A toilet. Down in the sewers the pet feeds on dead lab animals dosed with growth hormones, and swells into a monster that starts eating people.

Despite its name, the alligator gar is what kind of animal?

A fish. It is the largest of the gars, wrapped in interlocking, bone-hard scales, and owes its name to a broad snout lined with big teeth.

The alligator snapping turtle lures fish using a worm-like appendage on which body part?

Its tongue. The turtle lies motionless in the water with its mouth open and shows off the wriggling lure until a fish swims in to take it.

Which 438,000-acre peat swamp on the Georgia-Florida border is famous for its alligators?

Okefenokee. Its name is usually translated as 'land of the trembling earth', after peat so unstable that stamping on it shakes the trees, though linguists also read it as 'bubbling water'.

Everglades National Park was the first US national park created to protect what?

A fragile ecosystem. Earlier parks had been created around spectacular scenery; this one was set up in 1947 to stop a flat, slow-moving wetland being drained away.

Alligators become sluggish and stop eating in winter in a state that is properly called what?

Brumation. Unlike a hibernating mammal, a brumating alligator does not sleep straight through: on warm winter days it stirs and comes out to bask.

How does the Chinese alligator compare in length with its American cousin?

About half as long. The smaller cousin is also the shyer one, spending its days hidden in burrows and coming out to feed at night.

Which South American reptiles share the alligators' family?

Caimans. Six species of them share the family Alligatoridae with the two alligators, and of the eight only the Chinese alligator lives outside the Americas.

Unlike most reptiles, what does a mother alligator do once her eggs hatch?

Guards them for a year or more. The hatchlings stay together in a pod close to her, and she rushes to defend any that are in danger.

Which other animals are known to lay their own eggs inside alligator nests?

Turtles. Florida red-bellied turtles slip their eggs into the mound that the mother alligator is already guarding for her own clutch.

Which record among living animals did the American alligator hold until a saltwater crocodile beat it in the same lab?

Strongest measured bite. Bite force in crocodilians climbs with body size, which is how the bigger saltwater crocodile came to take the record.

How does an alligator breathe when the water around it freezes over?

It pokes its snout through the ice. The tip stays clear like a snorkel while the body hangs below, as alligators at an American swamp park showed during the freezes of 2018 and 2019.

A 2016 study challenged which old belief about alligators?

They never stop growing. Decades of recaptures at one coastal wildlife reserve showed growth all but ceasing, at about 43 years old in males and 31 in females.

What tells a mother alligator that it is time to dig open her nest?

Calls from inside the eggs. The young start making high-pitched noises before they hatch, and she scrapes away the nesting material to let them out.

What colour are the camouflage bands on hatchling American alligators?

Yellow. The bright bands break up a hatchling's outline among reeds and marsh grasses, then fade away as the animal grows.

Which two Florida tribes originated alligator wrestling, initially as a way to obtain food?

Miccosukee and Seminole. Handling live alligators began as a way of catching food, and only later turned into a roadside show staged for tourists.

According to Florida wildlife officials, which predator may take the greatest toll on young alligators?

Larger alligators. Otters, snakes and large bass all take hatchlings, but cannibal adults, mostly big males, may be the worst threat of all.

What most often makes a wild alligator lose its fear of humans and become dangerous?

People feeding it. A hand-fed alligator learns to link humans with food, and most attacks involve animals that have lost their fear that way.