24 October 2018
Predators are thriving in places
they shouldn't, revealing some serious misunderstandings about their behaviour
and how to protect them
By Isabelle Groc
WHEN Brian Silliman found himself
face to face with an alligator, he thought he was seeing a ghost. It was night
and he was knee deep in mud in a salt marsh in Georgia, searching for crabs and
snails. Alligators are freshwater reptiles, so Silliman was not expecting to
come across one, but the pair of red eyes watching him was unmistakably real.
Thinking fast, he shook a cage between him and the predator to scare it away.
“That freaked me out,” he says.
The next morning, haunted by the
encounter, Silliman, a conservation biologist at Duke University, North
Carolina, couldn’t stop wondering why the alligator was in the salt marsh.
Returning to the site, he spotted more of them – and they seemed to be right at
home. Diving into the scientific literature, he discovered that alligators are
not the only predators found thriving in places where they are not supposed to
live. It was a light-bulb moment. “I started re-evaluating everything I had
been taught about large animals,” he says.
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