Author: Damian Foley
When your morning safety briefing includes the sentence, “Make sure you stick your hand in the gator’s mouth and touch the tongue!” you know you definitely don’t have a traditional 9-to-5 job.
But that’s all in a day’s work for the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission’s resident alligator experts, state alligator biologist Alicia Wassmer and alligator conservation technician Liz Scarlett, whose duties include monitoring the health, growth, behavior, and movement of North Carolina’s gator population.
Recently, Scarlett and Wassmer traveled to Lake Waccamaw for a week of field research. They were joined by more than just Lake Waccamaw’s hundreds of wild crocodilians, though: Clemson University doctoral student Miriam Boucher brought the undergraduates from the course she teaches: “Belly of the Beast: diet and microplastics in the American Alligator.” They traveled north of the state line to investigate the gators’ stomach contents; meanwhile, Bronwyn Williams, a research curator at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, accompanied the team to collect leeches from the gators' mouths to aid her own research into invertebrates.
The alligators were humanely captured and brought onto dry land where they were measured and had their stomachs flushed so that the contents could be inspected. Any gators who hadn’t previously been caught were microchipped, so that their growth and movements could be monitored.
The first rain bands from incoming Hurricane Helene did not deter the curious locals, who stopped their cars, golf carts and bicycles to watch the proceedings and chat with the researchers while they worked. The weather, however, did deter the gators, and as the rain intensified, the alligators slipped underwater and out of view. Wassmer estimated she saw 65 alligators on the penultimate day of research; on the final day, as the heavens opened, only four were spotted and just two were caught.
One of those two was an 8-foot-long female that was well-known to Scarlett and Wassmer, having been caught several times in the last few years. She was recognizable in part due to a large, raised wound on her snout – a souvenir from a prior battle. Boucher inspected the wound and found another alligator’s tooth embedded deep within; she successfully removed the tooth and cleaned the wound to speed up the healing process.
Boucher and Williams hit the culinary jackpot with the final day’s other catch, a 5-foot, 4-inch-long juvenile gator. While flushing the future apex predator’s stomach, they found the feather from a raptor, a mostly intact ribbon snake and two species of crawfish, one of which is highly invasive and the other native, and likely new-to-science.
While Boucher took the feather and snake back to Clemson for further inspection, Williams bagged the new crawfish – the only individual of that species seen during the trip and the first native one the NCWRC biologists have ever found at Lake Waccamaw – and returned with it to her lab in Raleigh to study it and deposit it into the museum’s extensive research collections.
As for the gators themselves, they were all safely returned to the water—healthy, but due to their newly emptied stomachs, a little hungry.
