THE ADVOCATE (Baton Rouge, Louisiana) 09 September 07 Louisiana program manages alligators - Rules limit hunt, push preservation (Sonia Smith)
The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries’ Nuisance Alligator Program is just one part of a larger strategy for dealing with the large reptiles.
The department’s alligator management program works to maintain the wild alligator population, issues hunting tags, and regulates the state’s $40 million alligator-farming industry.
The management program was developed after years of unregulated hunting depleted the wild alligator population, said Noel Kinler, the head of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries’ alligator management program.
The department closed the hunting season in 1962. The current management program opened 10 years later, in Cameron Parish, before expanding gradually into all coastal parishes in 1979, Kinler said.
Kinler, a biologist, has been chief of the alligator program since 2000.
“In order to protect alligators you need to protect the habitat they live in,” Kinler said. “So we created a system that encourages landowners to protect and maintain coastal land.”
More than 80 percent of coastal land in Louisiana is in private ownership, Kinler said. Today, landowners can sell alligator eggs from their land to people who farm the reptiles, fetching an average of $15 an egg.
Farmers collected 300,000 eggs during the 2006 season — September 2006 to August 2007.
The department requires farmers to return 14 percent of the hatchlings to the land they came from to maintain the wild population, Kinler said. This year, farmers returned more than 60,000 young alligators to the state’s wetlands, he said.
Kinler and his researchers conduct yearly aerial surveys of nest density to see how many eggs can be collected from a particular area, and how many alligators can be hunted there annually.
Hunters reaped over $11 million from selling last season’s catch, according to the department. Alligator hide sold for $39 a foot.
“From an alligator perspective, it gives private landowners some kind of incentive to maintain the habitat as quality wetland habitat,” Kinler said.
Louisiana program manages alligators