Swamp Blog
Learn some interesting facts about this feared predator’s diet. Captain Stuart of Florida Airboating answers the question.
The Alligator Diet
Ever wonder what gators eat? The turtle is a favorite, and it must be good for your teeth because they can live to be 100 years old and grow a whole new set of teeth. Now I wish I could figure that one out. That would save me a lot of money on dentist bills. But, frogs, fish, snakes, turtles, iguanas, small prey, makes up most of their diet. They do eat birds. They do eat mammals, some of the bigger ones eat mammals.
But as far as birds – take a great blue heron. It can be almost five foot tall with a seven foot wingspan. They weigh less than three pounds and its mostly feathers and bones. The feathers give the alligators digestion fits.
That’s kind of like their last choice of prey bird. Mammals, they’ll tuck away. We call it cook and they’ll stop them up under some rocks or some vegetation for a few days and let them just decay and tend to rise again and they’ll come back in like say an otter I saw one grab an otter one time took four days but it stuck it up under a mud bank and it would come back every time I went farther that alligator was close by but you could see oil coming up around the side.
On the morning of the fourth day I came by and he had that otter by the tail and he was slamming it back and forth into the water and knocking the hair off. Once he got almost all the hair off of it, he gobbled it down whole.