The dangerous job of alligator conservation and the fight to save coastal habitats
Conservationists raid alligator nests to restore population
Conservationists raid alligator nests to restore population
Conservationists raid alligator nests to restore population
In the last 60 years, alligators in Louisiana have gone from endangered to thriving thanks to regulations, alligator farms, and nest harvesters, who are tasked with the dangerous job of conservation.
To illustrate the rich bounty of alligators in Louisiana, airboat captain Randy Fabre took sister station WDSU through the marsh in Bayou Barataria. Just 10 minutes from the dock, Fabre coasts toward an alligator nest and scoops baby gators out of the clear freshwater by hand.
“This is last year’s batch,” Fabre says, holding up a big-eyed alligator that’s about 8 inches long. “That’s only about 7 months old.”
It’s mid-mating season in the bayou, and this young gator’s mother will soon prepare her nest again for a clutch of up to 80 eggs. Fabre will return with other conservationists in June to raid this nest and thousands more. It's an unconventional approach that has created a multi-million-dollar alligator industry and rescued the population.
Baby alligators like the one he’s holding have a slim chance of surviving in the wild. They are hunted by a range of bayou wildlife, from large birds to other alligators.
“They’re carnivores,” Fabre says. “Most of the babies don’t make it … What's really amazing is to think, we almost wiped them out. We almost killed them all, and now we got 2.2 million alligators because we hunt them.”
In 1986, after decades of studying alligator behavior when populations were scarce, Louisiana’s Department of Wildlife and Fisheries launched a novel alligator ranching program to save the species in Louisiana. Licensed alligator farmers are allowed to collect alligator eggs on privately-owned land and incubate and hatch the eggs. Then, the hatchlings are raised on the farm until they grow to 3 to 5 feet long, when they are big enough to move from prey to predator.
Most of the alligators raised on the farms are harvested and sold for meat or hides, but a small percent are returned to their nesting habitat. The program, coupled with highly regulated international trade laws, is credited with rebounding alligator populations in Louisiana.
Russell Easley runs NOLA Air Boat Tours in Crown Point and harvests alligator eggs for local farms. He says the number of alligators returned to the wild has been steadily dropping as more juvenile alligators released from farms survive in the wild.
“We were bringing back 15 percent, it went to 12 percent, now we at 5 percent,” Easley said. “The reason it kept going down is because they kept doing studies, and the population keeps increasing, so the returns are working.”
But the tide of bayou life is turning. Storms, rising seas, sediment diversion, infrastructure, and saltwater intrusion are eroding Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, where 95% of the state’s alligators live.
“It's all disappearing,” Fabre said. “Places I used to walk on land like this, it's open water now … That's been the challenge for all of us. The alligators -- what's going to happen to them when all this disappears?”
Louisiana has a $2 billion plan to save the starving marsh by reconnecting it to the Mississippi River through a mid-Barataria sediment diversion. If completed, it would be the largest environmental infrastructure project in U.S. history, but the project is controversial. It could damage other fisheries, expand the existing gulf dead zone by introducing more pollutants, and impact other wildlife, including dolphins.
