Here’s something you don’t see every day – a larger alligator that decided it was so hungry it was going to eat a smaller alligator. The debacle was filmed earlier this month in Florida by Alex Figueroa, a man who witnessed the event in person.
I live in Florida myself, and I’ve yet to see anything this crazy. The large American alligator, which reportedly measured up to 12 feet in length, opted to chomp on a smaller-sized version of itself in an act of cannibalism.
Despite this being something you don’t see every day, it’s apparently not that uncommon for an alligator to eat its own kind. The general rule of thumb is, when an alligator is hungry, it’ll eat the nearest tasty-looking thing; even if that thing is another of its own species.
University of Iowa’s Christopher Brochu says, “Gators are very opportunistic and will eat whatever they can find; anything that can fit down their throat is food. This includes gators, alive or dead.”
Based off of what Brochu says, there’s no telling from the video alone whether the smaller gator was already dead when it was grabbed for a snack by big daddy, or if the larger gator is the one that killed the smaller gator because it was hungry.
The video of the large American gator chewing on, attempting to swallow, and even flinging the carcass around, can be watched below:
It definitely looks like that baby gator was bite-sized for this monster, but that's not even as big as they come. Male American aligators can grow to be up to 3 feet longer than this specimen.
Yeah... I'll just stay far away from those.
Source: National Geographic
