Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Last summer my family and I visited Brunswick Georgia. We had the great opportunity to spend a day motoring into Okefenokee Swamp in a flat bottom boat. We oberved worlds of wonderful wildlife and also some terrible biting flies that seem to thrive on bug spray! Anyway, of course we had the great fortune of studying huge numbers of alligators, both large and small. One curiosity we noticed, several of the smaller (2-4') gators had noticable deformities. Theses deformities seemed restricted to the tail and hind legs. The deformities included small, missing or terribly curved parts. None of the larger specimens seemed affected, I suppose through a process of survival of the fittest. Therefore, my questions. Have any of the other readers noticed this at Okefenokee or elsewhere? Is there a known cause? Could it ultimately threaten the population there or elsewhere?

Never heard about these problems in the Okefenokee, but I am also interested in getting more infos.

Okay, I don't really know much about alligators or science stuff, but I was browsing through the forum and your question interested me. The only thing that I came across that might be relevent with was this:-

http://www.uga.edu/srel/swamp.htm

Although it was written back in 1996.

Yvonne

Most excellent article!! How did you ever find it? There must be some link, I believe. Thanks for the info.

Glad you found it interesting. I actually just tried a few Google searches to see what I could come up with. Can't remember exactly how I got that link, but probably used a combination of 'alligator', 'deformity' and 'okefenokee'....sometimes the simple approach works And ok, I admit it, I'm a librarian, I do this stuff for a living (embarassed mumble).

Yvonne