ST PETERSBURG TIMES (Florida) 20 September 04 Gator attack ends protection on island - Sanibel changes its environment friendly policy of relocating nuisance alligators after one kills a landscaper. (Tom Zucco)
Just about everyone who has lived on Sanibel Island more than a few years agrees on at least this much: At the time, it was a noble idea.
Twenty years ago, Sanibel decided to go out of its way to protect the alligators that inhabit the community which sits on a small barrier island across a causeway from Fort Myers and was raked last month by Hurricane Charley.
The city received a special permit from the state that allowed it to relocate many nuisance alligators to the adjoining J.N. "Ding" Darling National Wildlife Refuge.
No other Florida community ever has been granted such a permit. Throughout the rest of the state, all nuisance alligators longer than 4 feet are trapped and destroyed. The state stopped relocating alligators in 1978.
But in Sanibel, many alligators longer than 4 feet got a reprieve.
They also got larger - in size and in numbers.
Something else also increased markedly. From June 2002 to May 2003, Sanibel police received 102 calls reporting nuisance alligators. For the same period in 2003-04, there were 163 calls.
If it seemed the policy wasn't working and the tide was turning against the alligators, all doubt was removed July 21, when landscaper Janie Melsek was attacked by an 11-foot, 9-inch alligator as she was trimming vegetation beside a pond in a residential area. Melsek, 54, lost part of her right arm but at first appeared to be recovering.
Two days later, she died from an infection caused by the 457-pound alligator's bites.
Alligators have killed 14 people in Florida since 1971. But for the second time in three years, one of those deaths occurred in the same Lee County resort town. (Robert Steele, 81, was killed while walking his dog near a canal by a 10-foot, 9-inch alligator Sept. 11, 2001.)
Suddenly, quiet little Sanibel was making headlines.
The city began to look for explanations. The two fatal attacks, and a third in April in which the victim survived, had several things in common: They were unprovoked, the alligators were more than 9 feet long, and all three attacks occurred in residential areas.
There was also this statistic: From June 2001 to May 2004, Sanibel police received 404 alligator complaints. Forty of the gators were moved, and only 20 destroyed.
After the April attack the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission publicly questioned Sanibel's alligator policy.
But it took Melsek's death for the city to formally change the policy. On Aug. 3, four days after a memorial service for Melsek, the Sanibel City Council voted unanimously to adopt a new policy that mirrors the state's nuisance alligator program. The city can now contract a trapper to kill nuisance alligators longer than 4 feet. Nuisance alligators less than 4 feet are still relocated.
Even before the new policy went into effect, city police and officials from the Fish and Wildlife Commission removed and destroyed eight alligators from Sanibel during the weekend of July 30-Aug. 1. The smallest was 5 feet, 8 inches; the largest measured 12 feet.
"Something," said Fish and Wildlife spokesman Gary Morse, "had to be done immediately."
What may have led to Sanibel's alligator-friendly policy may also have led to its demise: the city's unique location.
About 6,100 people live on the island. The median age is 60, and the median house value is $392,400. Sanibel is also home to U.S. Rep. Porter Goss, who was nominated recently to head the CIA. Goss was Sanibel's first mayor. He served from 1974-77, and remained on the City Council until 1982.
Officials say Sanibel residents have always been keenly aware of preservation efforts, at least in part because two-thirds of the 17.2-square-mile island is taken up by the Darling Refuge.
"Because we've been environmental friendly, we've created more habitat for alligators," said Sanibel police Chief Bill Tomlinson. "A developer has to build retention ponds and lakes.
"But those developments also create a habitat for alligators."
Tomlinson, who has worked on the island for about 18 years, said the city's original intentions were good, but once alligators became too numerous and public safety became an issue, the policy had to change.
"It clearly became an issue (in July)," he said. "It pushed me to make a recommendation."
The new policy, he said, has widespread support within the community, though it certainly isn't getting much attention right now because the island is still cleaning up after Hurricane Charley, which struck Aug. 13.
But when the subject of alligators was still on the front burner before the storm, there were a few people, including Melsek's brother, who were advocating that all alligators in Sanibel should be destroyed.
"Letting alligators live in Sanibel," Lee Melsek told the Fort Myers News-Press, "is like letting lions and tigers walk down Michigan Avenue in Chicago."
That, said Tomlinson, is not the solution. "We've come up instead with a plan that will make our citizens safer," he said, "But that by no means changes the fact that we live in an environment where alligators live.
"It's a difficult balancing act, but something we have to balance."
Florida lists the alligator as a "species of special concern," which in the case of the alligator, means it has the potential to become a public safety issue. If not managed and protected, its numbers could drop significantly. It is a first-degree misdemeanor in Florida to kill, possess or capture an alligator.
But after years of decline, the state is now home to about 1.5-million alligators. Coupled with a state population approaching 17-million, the odds of confrontations between humans and alligators have greatly increased.
"Twenty years ago, we didn't have the alligator problems we do now," Morse said. "Our policy has become more flexible as the alligator population has recovered and done well."
To the point where limited public hunts are allowed now.
Still, there are those who think Sanibel overreacted.
Henry Dunn, 61, who has lived in Florida on and off since 1979, regularly visits the Darling Refuge.
"I'm concerned because, unfortunately, like the shark and the wolf, alligators are too easy to target as being ruthless and aggressive," said Dunn, who lives in nearby North Fort Myers.
"I'm not saying I want an alligator as a pet or that they can't be provoked. But we have to look at the whole picture. At the planning board and city council that approved all the development in the first place. At the developers. And at the police who will not enforce the law as to people who feed these creatures."
Feeding alligators is a second-degree misdemeanor in Florida, and although a necropsy of the alligator that attacked Melsek showed it had not been fed, authorities say they wouldn't expect to find human food in an alligator, even if it had been fed recently, because of the animal's strong digestive system.
"People don't understand that when you live close to nature, you're going to have close encounters," Dunn said. "The whole situation in Florida is one that we're rapidly losing many of the very things that brought most of us here - the natural beauty and the chance to see eagles, alligators and other wildlife."
But in Sanibel, the issue had become more immediate.
"If you have to choose between the life of an alligator or the life of human being," Tomlinson said, "you choose on the side of the human being."
Gator attack ends protection on island -