As we enter the Okefenokee Wilderness Area, the landscape opens up into what is called the prairie. Like any prairie, there are few trees, and plentiful grasses and wildflowers. It’s October, and, as in my own yard, October means swamp sunflowers. The resemblance to my yard ends there. We’re cruising in open water, and the wildflowers grow from floating islands of peat called batteries. Occasionally, an alligator rests among the sunflowers.
The alligator in the photo above, you might notice, has a tag on its tail. It was placed there by the people on this boat, researchers with the University of Georgia Marine Extension/ Seagrant Coastal Ecology Lab. We’re here today to recapture tagged gators and measure them, but we pass this one by. I’ve been anticipating this footage – the pursuit, the struggle, the part where they bring an alligator onto the boat. I ask if they might go back for it, but no, it’s too big for the amount of space we have with a camera crew on board.
Alligators are adaptable, which we see in Florida. We find them in retention ponds and city parks, and also in wild rivers and swamplands. But, do they thrive equally in each setting? Does a mother raise her young any differently in a ditch than in a large lake? We’ll see some ditch parenting later in the day, by the way.
These questions about alligators in different settings are what keeps Dr. Kimberly Andrews and her crew coming back to the Okefenokee.
The Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge
Before we delve into the gator research, let’s get to know our habitat. It’s only a couple of hours from Tallahassee, and yet, this is my first time here. It’s a south Georgia swamp with a strong connection to Florida. This connection comes from the swamp serving as headwaters for the Suwannee and St. Mary’s Rivers. The Suwannee flows into the Gulf, while the St. Mary’s is the Florida/ Georgia border as it heads to the Atlantic (on the map above, follow that squiggly dotted line to the right). The Suwannee headwaters are further protected by the Osceola National Forest, which borders the Okefenokee to the south, in Florida.
Combined, the Okefenokee and Osceola NF cover over 600,000 acres, around the size of the Apalachicola National Forest closer to home. Large, contiguous habitats are often home to sensitive species of plants and animals, and in the Okefenokee Wildlife Refuge, that includes a few animals we’ve covered over the years: red cockaded woodpeckers, eastern indigo snakes, and wood storks, to name a few. There are also over 15,000 alligators.
The Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge alone is about 407,000 acres, 353,981 of which is a designated a wilderness area. It’s the largest blackwater swamp in North America, and, as such, it’s an ideal place to study alligators. In the most protected areas of the Refuge, you can observe them in different swamp habitats; some are open like this prairie, while others are wooded. At the fringes of the swamp, you can see how alligators live in proximity to humans.
The driver of this wetland ecosystem is tied to the way plants die and decompose in a swamp. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that there are over 401 million cubic meters of peat in the Okefenokee. Peat looks like mud, but mud is a combination of soil- which is ground up rock- and decomposing plant matter. Peat is entirely organic, formed in the anaerobic conditions on the swamp bottom.
Land of the Trembling Earth
There’s a whole language around peat in the Okefenokee Swamp. Clumps of the organic matter sitting on the water are called “blowups.” As they get bigger and gain moss, sedges, and shrubs, they become “batteries.” And once they’re big enough to host trees they’re called “houses.”
Dan Chapman, Public Affairs Specialist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Cited from an USFWS article titled For Peat’s Sake.
Mark Hoog, a researcher with the UGA Coastal Ecology Lab, pokes a blowup with a stick. “This is where the Okefenokee gets its name… ‘the land of the trembling earth.’ So, if I push on this, you can see it actually bobs up and down, which is the trembling earth part.”
The Okefenokee’s peat beds can be up to 15 feet deep. It takes 53 years for an inch of peat to accumulate, and it’s been building up for over 6,500 years. For as long as it’s been building up, alligators have been making dens in batteries, and basking among the grasses and wildflowers that grow from them.
Alligator behavior in the Okefenokee swamp
Kimberly and her lab started tracking alligators here in 2017. The research resembles bird banding programs we’ve covered in the past, but instead of bands, the research team clips large, easy to read tags onto adult gator tails. But the tag might fall off, so they also clip scutes, the ridged scales on their tails. They number the scutes counting away from the base of the tail, and clip the scutes in unique combinations (3rd scute, 8th scute, 11th scute, for example). This gives them two ways to identify an alligator.
Kimberly and her team weigh and measure each gator when they tag them, and repeatedly as they recapture the animals over the years. This way, they can chart how fast each individual grows in different habitat types, when they nest, and how they exhibit different behaviors. The lab also uses game cameras to capture moments that might not occur with humans around. This is how they recorded audio of an alligator defending her nest from a black bear.
In our stories on banded birds, researchers learned about new (to humans) behaviors by tracking individual birds over time. The same is true for this alligator study.
Kimberly shares one such insight. “We call this facilitative feeding. And we actually got a publication out of it. It’s this really neat behavior where a mother alligator will actually wave her tail in the water, and that stirs up all these insects. Then the babies come and feed around her. It’s pretty cool.”
Alligator genetics and behavior
Mark joined the team to gather data for his Ph.D.. He’s interested in the role genetics plays in the behaviors they observe.
“We’re talking about genetics,” Mark says. “So, looking at relatedness and how that affects the alligator dynamic and hierarchy. We’re talking about epigenetics. And epigenetics is just how your DNA is expressed. Your DNA doesn’t change. But your environment and the things you interact with can change that expression.”
They’ve identified eight habitat types within the Okefenokee Swamp, and today, we’re sampling the prairie. Other parts of the swamp are more heavily forested. They also find alligators around human-made structures; Mark comes close to catching one that hangs out in a boat house.
I’m surprised to see him try to reel in adult alligators with a fishing rod. At the end of the line is a small grappling hook that won’t puncture a tough gator hide. It’s enough to let Mark pull the animal towards the boat, where the team catches it with a coyote snare on a painting pole. Some days are more fruitful than others, and today we experience a few near misses.
Having struck out in the prairie, we head to a human-made waterway to observe one of the most important animal behaviors of all: how a mother parents her offspring.
Confronting the ditch mama
Alligators nest in the summer, and now, in October, we head to a nest with two-month old baby gators. This family doesn’t occupy any of the habitats within the swamp; instead, we find them in a ditch that runs along the roads at the edge of the Refuge. This is a chance to take genetic samples from a dozen or so babies, and to re-measure the mother. As we approach the gators, though, the mother starts loudly hissing.
Kimberly points out that, as Mark approaches the mother, she stands her ground and hisses, but makes no move to attack him. Oftentimes a mother will allow the team to handle her babies, but not today. It means more work, and a degree of danger, but the mother is exhibiting behavior of note to their studies.
“How your mother interacts with you can change your epigenetics, and thus your behavior,” Mark says. “So, we’re looking at that with the alligators. So some mother alligators are very good, very defensive, [and] will protect from humans and bears. Other alligators, not so great. And if a human comes along, you’re on your own.”
These babies are not on their own. Mama swims across the ditch, leading the babies to the far bank. Mark drives back to Okefenokee Adventures to pick up a kayak, and I film some parental interaction.
Sampling and measuring gator babies
You can watch the mother’s capture in the video. It provides the action I had hoped for, and lets me move the camera close to an adult alligator. This is the kind of thing a field biologist can only learn on the job; they quickly restrain her, and all it takes is the weight of two humans to keep her still. Mark kayaks out to pick up the babies.
The babies are too small to tag, but Mark and research technician Abbey Crossman clip their scutes. The babies now have identifying marks, and the scutes provide Mark with genetic samples. Statistically, most of these young alligators won’t survive to adulthood, but, as they grow and are observed, the lab can see how babies raised in a ditch by a protective mother behave over the course of their lives, and potentially how they raise their own offspring.
As Mark handed Abbey baby gators, she noticed a loaf of bread in the water. One danger for gators in a human-inhabited area is that they may lose their apprehension of people. Think of geese in any pond where people have fed them; they expect to be fed, and they approach anyone who goes near them.
The research team would have preferred not to have subdued the mother alligator, but Mark figures this will reignite her apprehension of humans.
Educating the public about Okefenokee alligators
It’s quite the scene here. Kimberly and Emily are sitting on the mother, and Mark and Abbey pick baby alligators out of a tub to measure them. Two camera people hover around the action.
People driving to and from the visitor center are understandably curious. Public outreach is a big part of their job, and Kimberly relishes the chance to explain what they’re doing, and to educate people about an often misunderstood animal.
Beyond talking to passersby or manning tables at events, the UGA Coastal Ecology Lab shares their research with the staffs at the Refuge, the Stephen C. Foster State Park on the west side of the swamp, and the privately owned Okefenokee Adventures outfitter operating in Folkston, on the east side of the Refuge. The people on these staffs interact with the public on a daily basis, and can share information about the research and even specific tagged gators in their areas.
“That’s really important for the visitor experience to come to the Okefenokee and feel like they are part of the research that’s going on out here,” Kimberly says. “For them to understand why conservation of our natural resources is so valuable.”
A few more images from our Okefenokee alligator adventure
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