South Florida is widely—and, as it happens, accurately—touted as the only place in the world where alligators and crocodiles rub scaly shoulders. And Everglades National Park, which protects a portion of the historically vast Everglades wetland mosaic and associated coastal habitats, offers decent odds of seeing both of these saurians—the American alligator and the American crocodile—in a single day of sightseeing.
What’s far less common is seeing a gator and a croc duking it out, which is what Taylor Bonachea managed to capture on video on March 19th close to the park’s Shark Valley Observation Tower:
In the video, the croc seems to be the aggressor, though both reptiles land some mean-looking bites as they snap, hiss, and scrabble around on what’s presumably the paved trail/tram road that leads to the observation tower. (That vantage provides a grand overview of the Shark River Slough, one of the primary drainages of the Everglades sawgrass marshlands.)
As The Naples Daily News noted, Bonachea told Storyful that the dispute ended with the gator retreating into the water and the croc claiming a basking spot.
A YouTube video from 2022 shows another, less-battle-royale-style gator/croc confrontation in the same area: in this case, an alligator blustering off a crocodile in a slough. The Shark River Slough has been something of a hotspot for reptilian showdowns lately: Last November, parkgoers visiting the Shark Valley Observation Tower filmed a large alligator, nicknamed “Godzilla,” cruising with an enormous Burmese python—the most infamous of the invasive exotic species bedeviling the Everglades ecosystem—in its jaws.
Back in 2009, meanwhile, an Everglades park ranger told a paddling tour group that he’d seen a well-known big (4 metres/14 feet long or so) crocodile in Ninemile Pond, in the zone where sawgrass marshes grade into mangrove swamp, once rush at an alligator after an unsuccessful try after a wading bird—an act the ranger interpreted as something like amped-up frustration.
These kinds of antagonistic encounters are probably on the rare side, as intrinsic habitat partitioning means gators and crocs in South Florida only semi-overlap. Alligators are predominantly freshwater crocodilians, while American crocs—which, like other crocodiles, possess working salt glands—are most associated with coastal reaches (from estuaries and lagoons to offshore keys and atolls). But gators absolutely tolerate brackish waters—indeed, some regularly forage in lagoons and bays, spicing up their diets with marine fare from blue crabs and mullet to stingrays and small sharks—and crocodiles have no problem with freshwater, setting the stage for the occasional run-in. In the Greater Everglades, where sheet-flow marshlands scattered with jungle hammocks and swampy cypress domes and strands drain via sloughs and tidal rivers into mangrove forest and coastal bays, there’s a messy and sprawling frontier indeed between gator and croc country.
That said, Dr. Adam Rosenblatt of the University of North Florida, whose lab has extensively studied American alligators as well as the South American black caiman, told me by email, “I’m not surprised by the footage because almost anywhere in the world where different species of crocodilians share the same space they end up fighting with each other at some point. Usually whoever is bigger claims the territory, though the winner can also be determined by whoever is most aggressive.”
“In the most recent video,” he continued, “it’s clear that the crocodile is the more aggressive one, and appears to be slightly bigger too.”
Rosenblatt also related that in 2009, his wife was conducting research in the southernmost Everglades and observed a croc consuming an alligator. “It was unclear if the crocodile had killed the gator or was just scavenging an already dead gator,” he said, “but either way it’s evidence that the two species interact with each other in the context of feeding.”
South Florida marks the northernmost extremity of the American crocodile’s current Neotropical range, though the species’ historical geography on the Pacific coast of Mexico, on the opposite side of the North American continent, may have extended as far north as Tiburón Island in the Gulf of California/Sea of Cortez. The northern fringes of the crocodile’s mostly coastal domain in Florida—surely set by the croc’s intolerance of cold winter temperatures—are roughly Tampa Bay on the Gulf side and the southern Indian River lagoon on the Atlantic Ocean side, the approximate northernmost extent of the Florida peninsula’s tropical/semi-tropical climatic zone. (Most nesting, according to 1989 review, probably has always gone down in Biscayne and Florida bays, along Florida’s southernmost toe.) A rebounding South Florida population has seen American crocs—some 2,000 of which are thought to inhabit the Sunshine State—show up more frequently in the far northern margins of their historical range, as when a 2.4-metre (8-foot) individual was photographed lounging at Melbourne Beach in 2022.
Better adapted to chilly conditions, American alligators prowl much more widely in the U.S. Southeast. Indeed, this is the most northerly crocodilian species on the planet (though the much smaller and vastly less-numerous Chinese alligator—the only other true alligator species—rivals it in that department). Gators get as far north as North Carolina’s Albemarle Sound, and it’s possible they may straggle even farther “poleward” into the Great Dismal Swamp on the Virginia-North Carolina line. But extended cold snaps below about 3.33 degrees Celsius (38 degrees Fahrenheit) appear to be a climatic limiting factor, helping define the gator’s biogeography.
Across the vast majority of its dominion, the American alligator is the only crocodilian around (and kingpin of its marsh- and swampland realm). It’s only in South Florida where it crosses paths with close relatives: not only the native American crocodile, but also the exotic spectacled caiman, a smaller Neotropical alligatorid that established a self-sustaining population here by the 1970s via releases and escapees from the pet and leather markets. There are signs that efforts to control or even eradicate Florida caimans—naturally limited by cold—may be working.
The American croc, by contrast, overlaps extensively with other crocodilians: alligators up north, and then Cuban crocodiles in Cuba, Morelet’s crocodiles in Mexico and Central America, and spectacled caimans from (besides South Florida) Mexico into northern South America, with potentially a little sympatry as well with the similarly sized but more slender-snouted Orinoco crocodile in the extensive delta of the Orinoco River. According to a species account in the IUCN Crocodile Specialist Group’s Crocodiles: Their Ecology, Management, and Conservation (1989), American crocs seem to generally be more coastal/estuarine where they coexist with good-sized freshwater compatriots such as the alligator and the Orinoco crocodile—and with the runty but hyper-feisty Cuban croc—and range farther inland up rivers and into freshwater lakes where they share geography with the littler caiman and Morelet’s croc.
Although it may not be especially ecologically significant, the croc/gator brawl in Shark Valley does offer a striking opportunity to compare the physical traits of these crocodilian cousins. The jaws provide the sharpest contrast: the croc’s narrow and snaggle-toothed, the gator’s much broader. Although the croc in the video appears darker due to wetness, American crocodiles have grayer hides than alligators, which are generally blackish. Size-wise, there’s a broad overlap between the two species, both among the heftier New World crocodilians. Bull American alligators typically max out around 4.2 to 4.5 metres (14 to 15 feet), though a murky record from the late 19th-century exists for a 5.8-metre (19-foot) individual killed on Marsh Island, Louisiana. The maximum length of the American crocodile, meanwhile, appears to be in the vicinity of 6 metres (20 feet).
Predator vs Prey
Predator vs Prey
Animal Behaviour
