When Steve Reagan moved to Louisiana in 1998, he had no idea he’d end up capturing hundreds of alligators.
Reagan, the current director for the Sam D. Hamilton Noxubee Wildlife Refuge, said he’d planned to take a job studying Louisiana black bears at Louisiana State University. When those plans fell apart, he went to work for the zoo in Baton Rouge. As part of that, he crafted a proposal to study alligators.
At the time, he knew nothing about alligators — he just wanted to work with animals.
“The funny part is, I figured, ‘How hard can it be?'” he said to the Starkville Rotary Club at the club’s weekly meeting Monday. “In wildlife and science you go the library and you look up all kinds of research and do all kinds of neat things. We know everything there is to know about alligators.”
Almost all alligator knowledge at the time — and to this day, Reagan later pointed out — came from one book, published in 1935: “The Alligator’s Life History” by E.A. McIlhenry.
The first night in Louisiana, Reagan, his wife and his professor went out on the bayou to find an alligator. The first one they found was a 10-footer that he had to figure out how to catch with a noose he was more used to catching bears with.
He said he got the noose around the alligator’s neck and then it disappeared into the water and out of sight.
“The water’s like six inches deep,” he said. “We should be able to see a 10-foot alligator.”
They prodded around, but couldn’t feel anything but the dirt beneath the water’s surface.
“We both look at Vern, my major professor, and it’s like, ‘What’s up? Where’s the alligator?’ He didn’t have a clue,” Reagan said. “So it’s like what do you do? We have an alligator–you can feel it on the other end of the line. It’s underground somehow.”
They searched and searched, but couldn’t find any sign of the alligator. Reagan said the line appeared to drop straight down into the earth. With no way to release the noose without accessing the a part of it around the alligator’s neck, Reagan said he came up with one idea to get it out of the ground.
“I start up the air boat and this alligator pops out of the earth,” he said. “I mean, covered in mud, just really mad now. If you want to figure out a way to make an alligator mad, you figured out a way to do it.”
They wrangled the alligator into the boat — a process Reagan said took about 90 minutes — and marked it for study.
That was the first of about 300 alligators captured over the course of Reagan’s doctoral work. He said the study was particularly large for the time — to that point, most alligator studies consisted of about 15 specimens at a time.
Through the study, Reagan learned more about how alligators live and interact with each other. For example, he said the alligator disappeared underground because they burrow into the earth, where they make dens. He said they realized alligators go underground more often than expected.
“Every time you go out to the Noxubee Refuge and say, ‘Oh I wonder if I’ll see any alligators today,’ and don’t see any, there’s a very good chance they are underground in these dens,” Reagan said. “They use these dens for protection. They use these dens to keep warm when it’s cold.”
He said they learned more about alligator social structure, such as that alligators of similar sizes tend to stick together — eight-footers stick with eight-footers, for example. He said they also learned that while it can appear the same alligators tend to the same nests, that’s not always the case. Still it’s hard to tell without tracking them.
The Noxubee Wildlife Refuge is home to about 200 alligators, Reagan said, with about a dozen of the “very, very big boys” that are about 14 feet long. Those, he said, may be some of the original alligators that were released into the refuge in the 1960s.
Reagan said he’s often asked if he’ll do any alligator research at the refuge. He said it’d be fun, but he’d like to see an outside researcher do it.
One reason for that is simple — fingers and toes.
“Maybe MSU will come up with someone to come do some for us,” he said. “Cause again, I like having 10 and 10.”
Alex Holloway was formerly a reporter with The Dispatch.
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