Alligators and Crocodiles

Does anybody here know about alligators and crocodiles?

Somebody thought that my "Gators are opportunistic feeders", "Gator attacks are more likely than croc attacks" etc. in the 10th chapter of my novel were paraphrasings about alligators and crocodiles.

However I researched alligators and crocodiles before I wrote this chapter.

He also thought that the character being attacked by a strange animal didn't note dentition. But he might have noted dentition and just not heard of or seen this animal until he got to the swamp and even then didn't know what it was until a doctor confirmed that what bit him was a gator.

I am talking about the 3rd post in this thread:

http://absolutewrite.com/forums/show...rld-Chapter-10

I want to check if what I wrote in my story about alligators and crocodiles is correct. I know that what I wrote about how to tell if it is an alligator is correct but I am not so sure about all the other stuff I wrote about alligators and crocodiles.

Well at 18:12 in this video a Croc vs Gator fight begins.


They circle around first. This is to show who is bigger. Sometimes this ends without a fight because 1 is noticeably bigger than the other. However if they are pretty evenly matched like this croc and gator the real violence starts with the head slapping(That is where the crocodilian opens its jaws and then suddenly closes them) and hissing. 1 thing about crocs and gators is that they can hiss with their mouths open or closed.

In this case the fight is interfered and leads to potentially 2 separate fights of croc vs croc and gator vs gator.

However if it were to continue the gator would more likely be the winner. This is because gators grow at a faster pace than crocs. But crocs have a stronger bite force so if the gator was the same size it might end in a draw where they both back off and if the gator was smaller the croc would win for sure.

There are alligators and crocs in the everglades and in the Florida keys. These are both places where crocs and gators fight with each other. Any further north than that and it is gator vs gator and any further south than that and it is croc vs croc.

Yes crocodiles are more aggressive than alligators. But they are also more shy than alligators. Alligators don't mind people being around them a lot. This is 1 reason why gators quite often go after people is because with people being so close to alligators they sometimes get too close for comfort. About 12 gator attacks a year for the past 40 years. In some places croc attacks are more common than gator attacks are here in the US. But on average there are more gator attacks per year than croc attacks, especially when considering american crocodile attacks vs american alligator attacks. I think it is somewhere around 6 gator attacks: 1 croc attack or some other large ratio.


I have also heard from this video that american crocodiles are mostly fish hunters whereas american alligators eat a variety of animals like deer and raccoons as well as fish.

It says that there are 90 american crocodile attacks and 61 american alligator attacks. I thought there would be lots more alligator attacks because of lots of people being so close to alligators but not nearly as many being close to crocodiles.

I mean I have read from other websites, particularly those about gator attacks that there have been a dozen gator attacks a year for the past 40 years but very few actually being fatal. Doing the math there that would be in the past 40 years, 480 alligator attacks. But the wikipedia page on crocodile attack says that there are only a few fatal crocodile attacks in the us and those are unverified. It doesn't say anything about the non-fatal crocodile attacks that occur in the us(Probably because non-fatal gator attacks are much more common).

But the alligator fatalities are most certainly verified.

I found in the simple search 134 alligator attacks in 2000 and 141 crocodile attacks in the same year. But most of those crocodile attacks are from South America, Mexico, and the Caribbean.

The many less crocodile attacks must be from the USA alone.

Actually the Florida keys still have crocs and gators. As far as I know the Florida keys are not part of the everglades.