There must be something in the water.
In Florida late last month, US Coast Guard Licensed Captain Kevin Brotz and his friends celebrated catching a near record-breaking 920-pound alligator in a lake outside Orlando.
“It was a battle, you know, I’ve been in fights that were kind of wilder — this one was kind of just a four-and-a-half-hour fight, and it started off very slow,” Brotz told CNN about the catch. “The gator just kind of stood his ground, he didn’t run. Usually they’ll swim away, you know, you got to find them.”
But this 13-foot-long gator never really took off, Brotz said, adding that he believes a creature of this size is used to standing his ground.
“You know he’s probably 60 to 90 years old and he’s used to eating whatever messes with him,” Brotz told CNN. “So he had no reason to run.”
Brotz did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider. The gator was the second-largest ever recorded in Florida. The top record holder weighed in at 1,043 lbs and was caught in 1989, Field and Stream magazine reported.
On August 26, the same day Brotz and his crew brought down their gator looking like a creature out of “Jurassic Park,” another monster was pulled out of the Yazoo River in Mississippi.
Insider previously reported the record-breaking Mississippi gator weighed in at 802.5 lbs and was more than 14 feet long. Its meat was donated to local soup kitchens, and its hide was sent to be processed into ultra-luxurious leather goods.
Red Antler Processing
Hunters catching gators of this size are doing a massive community service, according to Christy Plott, the vice chair of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s crocodile specialist group, because the giant creatures become territorial, making them exceptionally dangerous to pets, livestock, and people.
“These wild culls are amazing, honestly, it’s incredible population control for the species,” Plott previously told Insider. “About 1 to 2% of wild alligators are culled annually, so it’s not a big number, and the goal is to take out some of the larger animals that are not productive for breeding and keep other alligators from breeding — which is obviously bad for the population as a whole.”
Gator hunting programs are highly regulated and have helped increase the species’ population since they were first listed as endangered in 1967 in a move Plott called “the single greatest conservation success story in the history of the world.”
The sales of the hunting licenses also fund local wildlife protection, Insider previously reported Tate Watkins, a research fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center, said.
“Regulated, sustainable hunting plays a huge role in wildlife conservation,” Watkins said.
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