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ORLANDO SENTINEL (Florida) 14 September 03 Knee-deep in alligators (Gary Taylor)
State biologist Arnold Brunell remembers the time he was approached for advice about opening a water-ski school on Lake Jesup.
His answer was simple: "Don't!"
Brunell can't imagine anyone water skiing on the Seminole County lake. "That would be like trolling," he said, laughing.
That's because Lake Jesup is home to one of the state's largest populations of alligators. It's also home to some of the state's largest gators.
Jack Campbell of Geneva knows that firsthand.
Last year, he hauled a 13-foot, 2-inch monster out of the lake during the state's annual gator-hunting season. It's the largest on record taken from Lake Jesup, surpassing the previous mark, taken in 1979, by 8 inches.
"They [gators] are abundant," said Campbell, 33.
But the big ones are hard to hunt, he said. They tend to swim toward the middle of the lake at night, making them a challenge to capture and kill, he said.
"You can catch the little ones all night long," Campbell said. Those 4- and 5-footers swim right toward a boat when a light is shined on them, he said. "The bigger ones are more coy."
With an estimated population of 12,925 gators, Jesup ranks second to mammoth Lake Okeechobee (28,106) for the number of alligators in a state lake.
But while Okeechobee has more than twice the number of gators as Jesup, it's also 28 times larger.
421 reptiles per mile
Jesup also is one of the most densely populated gator lakes, with an estimated 421 of the reptiles per mile of shoreline. Only Lake Trafford in Collier County, with 644, and Lake Hancock, with 611, have more gators per mile of shoreline, but both are much smaller than Jesup, Brunell said.
Some think Lake Jesup's gator population is so large because, years ago, wildlife officers would capture nuisance gators and release them in Jesup.
But Brunell, a biologist with the Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission, said gators thrive in Jesup because it is an ideal environment.
With little development along the shore, there is plenty of habitat for females to lay their eggs. And the lake is loaded with the perfect gator meal, such as mudfish, gars, shad and turtles.
Alligators would have thrived in the lake even if the nuisance gators weren't released there, he said.
And because there has been little development along the lake, the state receives few complaints, Brunell said.
Much of the land around Jesup is not developable, and large tracts have been purchased by the St. Johns River Water Management District in an effort to control runoff into the lake.
New homes are being built along the lake in Winter Springs, but for the most part, those living on the shores of Jesup have been there for years.
Gator tales: The big ones
It wasn't long ago that the alligator was almost hunted into extinction.
In 1967, it was listed as an endangered species. Ten years later, it was downlisted to threatened, and in 1987, it was reclassified as "threatened due to similarity of appearance" in an effort to protect endangered crocodilians such as the American crocodile.
Statewide, it is estimated that there are more than 1 million gators in the wild.
Wildlife officers, equipped with high-powered lights, go out at night in the spring to count gators. The state's annual census of gators is broken down by size.
"Lake Jesup has always had a lot of very large alligators," Brunell said.
When it comes to the number of gators 9 feet or longer, Jesup's 194 is nowhere near the top of the list -- that's Lake Okeechobee with 1,760.
Yet of the 22 gators taken from Lake Jesup during the 2002 harvest, 15 were longer than 9 feet, and nine of those were longer than 10 feet. Including Campbell's catch, five were 12 feet or longer.
The state record for the longest alligator was set in 1997, when a state trapper killed a nuisance gator near the east end of Lake Monroe, a few miles down river from Jesup, that measured 14 feet, 5/8 of an inch.
Todd Braden of Sanford, who has spent most of his 46 years around the lake, gives airboat tours each Sunday out of Black Hammock Fish Camp on the south shore. He has seen gators in the lake that are "right at 14 feet," but he has never seen the 18-footer that local lore has living in Jesup.
"Everybody claims there's an 18-footer in there," Braden said.
He doesn't believe that for a minute, but he does think it's only a matter of time before a gator is taken from Jesup that breaks the state record.
"Jesup's going to break it one day," he said.
People come to Lake Jesup for the alligators, said Braden, who also has hunted gators. Many people who take his airboat tours are from England, but he gets business from "all over the world."
September is not a good time to see gators on Lake Jesup, Braden said. That's because they tend to hide during the annual harvest.
"They know it's hunting season. They'll be back in October."
Farmers harvest eggs
Lake Jesup is a designated egg-collection area, where commercial alligator farmers pay the state to harvest eggs.
Wildlife agents survey the water by helicopter to count nests, and the commercial farmers can harvest from up to half of the nests, Brunell said.
They pay the state $5 apiece for the eggs, which average 35 per nest. Farmers typically keep about 25 eggs from each nest, he said.
"It's part of the alligator management people don't see," Brunell said.
Gators raised by commercial farmers, including those hatched from the purchased eggs, are not protected by the state's rules and can be killed for their meat and hides.
The largest alligator nest Brunell ever encountered in Lake Jesup held 93 eggs. It's possible that two alligators laid eggs in the same nest, but that would be highly unusual, he said.
Gators on the menu
On the south side of Lake Jesup, Black Hammock Restaurant has capitalized on the gators' presence.
Glenn Wilson, who opened the restaurant more than a decade ago, sold it four years ago and recently returned as general manager, said people come from far and wide because of the gators.
"You can't duplicate this in Ohio or Indiana or New York," he said.
There are alligator sandwiches and meals on the menu, live gators in an aquarium, and an assortment of souvenirs from gator heads to teeth and jewelry.
You even can have your photo taken with a small alligator or view them up close in cages.
The alligator meat, products and even the live gators found next to the restaurant come from commercial farmers, not from the lake.
And because of the proliferation of commercial farmers, there is no money to be made by hunters during the annual harvest, which runs from Sept. 1 through the first week of October, Campbell said.
Small alligators are ideal for their tender meat and hides that can be turned into leather products, but they offer no challenge, Campbell said. The 13-foot, 2-inch gator he killed was decades old, and the meat was inedible.
Giant among gators
Killing that gator provided all of the challenge that Campbell could handle.
He set out on an airboat from Black Hammock Fish Camp one evening last October.
About 2 a.m., he encountered the giant reptile on the north end of the lake, near State Road 46. He was able to get the gator to swallow a wooden hook baited with meat. He then harpooned the gator and trailed it for about an hour, when he shot it with a second harpoon.
He finally killed the gator with a bang stick -- a pipe that fires a bullet at close range -- but "he was so big, we couldn't get him onto the airboat."
Instead, the gator was tied to the side of the boat. Campbell had to dock at a ramp on S.R. 46 because it was too far back to Black Hammock Fish Camp.
He is having the front half of the gator preserved by a taxidermist because he has no place to display the entire gator.
Knee-deep in alligators

how can people be so cruel to make an animal suffer like that and then to not even make any good out of it! people get me mad! they even said only the smaller ones are good for eating and to use the skin... so why kill the king of the lake! i also feel that because people always go for the biggest gator that it messes with the gene pool and thats why the biggger recordings of record size gators/crocs was many many years ago. i feel its the same with people hunting deer. why go after the biggest buck! because of those people in later generations there won't be 'big bucks'. people really need to think before messing with nature!

sorry for the long post but i really needed to say how i feel on this subject.

k

I really understand you,kcaiman. This big guy might have survived the bad times in the 50s and 60s, many fights with other males till he became the "King of the lake". Its sad, but the nuisance alligator program in Florida is important for alligator conservation.

Ralf
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Sorry...this hunt has not been a part of the nuisance alligator program. We will never be able to do anything against hunters, which are always searching for the biggest and heaviest gators.
They are hunting for trophies, I think, so always the big ones are targets.Its sad, very sad, but the hunts are the result of the extremely sucessfull conservation activities in Florida.
Link

First off before anyone says I hate alligators I would like to say I believe I like gators as much as anyone on this forum. I feel your blanket statements are painting hunters with a wide brush that is not justified. I agree that harpoons and guthooks are cruel and many other hunters do as well, many positively refuse to use them; but of course the media is always after the most dramatic and horrific story. I don't think the meat would be inedible as claimed a little tough maybe but not inedible. I think he just flat didn't want to eat it and I don't agree with that. I disapprove of the mans methods and conduct but he is not typical hunter. Unfortunately he is the kind that gets the press because it makes a better story. I don't hunt gators but I do hunt deer and I can tell you that 90% of the hunters in my area don't hunt for the "biggest deer" and many shoot a doe or a spike buck(inferior genetics) for the meat. In fact quality of deer antlers has been going up over the years in Texas anyway. I certainly can't agree with anyone that hunts ONLY for trophies and trashes the meat and again thats not typical. Even when a hunter does get a very big buck they are almost always old animals with almost no teeth left. When a deer gets his best antlers at five or six years old he is over the hill so to speak. He has passed on his genetics and will usually starve or be killed by dogs or coyotes in a year or two at most. A bullet at this point is a lot better that being eaten alive in a year or so. A 13ft gator isn't quite the same as most will still live and breed for quite a while but I think everyone can agree that a wild gator that big is no spring chicken and that he has passed on his genetics many times. I don't see his death at that time as great loss in genetics to the population because as I said before he has already passed on his genetics a LOT. I am not going to argue much with anyone that disagrees with my position on this as I believe only a few people on this forum hold my views and there is no point in getting into a long arguement beating my head against a wall. Those of you that disagree I guess we will have to agree to disagree. However I do encourage anyone that disagrees with my views on this to get some more facts and to look at the other side of the story before making a emotional decision about all hunters, hunting and its suposed "cruelty".

Jug, Oddly enough we have another thread going on about hunting gators and we have basically the same ideas and opinions on this topic.. Glad to see there is some similarity..
Xain
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He that cannot reason is a fool. He that will not is a bigot. He that dare not is a slave.

I hate reading stuff like this (the article) and any other literary reminder of how F'd up humans are and can be. We, as a species, are the worst evolutionary plague that ever evolved on this planet. We cause more damage and extintion in a shorter period of time than any other virus or disease ever has. We have only been in this highly damaging stage of our evolution (the technological age) for a couple of hundred years now and already we have almost completely overpopulated the planet and have almost poluted it to irreparable proportions. We justify our greedy and selfish ways with convenient religion and self appointed "purpose" and state that it was all zapped here for our taking, but this is just NOT THE CASE. We fit into the balance of nature for the first 4 or 5 million years of our development, and only in the last 10 or 20 years, with the advent of invention of better tools, weapons and clothing did we begin to stray outside of it. And even then we were part of the ongoing balance until just a few thousand years ago when the agriculture age emerged. With this came cities, with cities came more growth and invention of better ways to beat the odds of survival. But even then the planet could handle our slowly expanding numbers. But within a few hundred years ago, medicine and weapons were advanced in leaps and bounds. Suddenly we could kill things oh-so-much-better and could build better cities and living conditions that were less susceptible to drought and famine, disease and predation. With this change our numbers no longer had any natural checks and balances. We were no longer a part of nature and her inherent balance. The only thing that has killed us after that, is ourselves. But still our numbers have only increased in geometric proportions. We went from several million people 5000 years ago, to over 100 million just 1000 years ago, to over a billion people 100 years ago, to over 6 billion today. And it's not just our numbers that are cause for the great damage that we do. It is our way of life. We're greedy. We take and take and take and don't give back. We clearcut, tear down, build and destroy, slaughter and consume, everything in our path. And we call it "Progress". What a joke. Our ways certainly are ways of borrowed time. It will catch up with us. And things like these gator hunts.... We mess up the ecosystems and then have to fix it with a hunt to cull down the numbers that are only overpopulated because we press them further back each year and unbalance their food supplies. People as a whole might foolishly believe that we are outside of nature and that our damage won't affect us too, but it will. And we are not exempt from the laws of nature. It's a very small planet and it's totally inevitable that we will certainly be affected by our own awful ways. Of this I am glad. I am just saddened that we have to be the last domino to topple and that all the other species have to suffer until then due to our selfish ways. So when a croc or a shark takes a human,.. I don't feel bad at all with the exception that it causes more of us idiots to go out and kill more of those murderous animals. Even though we are the only evil, murderous animal on the planet.

Sorry for the rant. I was just reminded as to why I despise humanity as much as I do.

>>how can people be so cruel to make an animal suffer like that and then to not even make any good out of it! people get me mad! they even said only the smaller ones are good for eating and to use the skin... so why kill the king of the lake! i also feel that because people always go for the biggest gator that it messes with the gene pool and thats why the biggger recordings of record size gators/crocs was many many years ago. i feel its the same with people hunting deer. why go after the biggest buck! because of those people in later generations there won't be 'big bucks'. people really need to think before messing with nature!
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>>sorry for the long post but i really needed to say how i feel on this subject.
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>>k
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True "power" is not to be found in social or economic placement or stature, which are merely illusory, finite, frail and brief.
True power is to be found in one's sheer will and personal determination to achieve one's goals at ANY cost and at ANY sacrifice.

on July 14th. It is doubtful that the answers will change and probable that the discussion will degenerate as it did previously. My suggestion would be to save band width and just read the July 14th thread if you so choose.

Bill